(2002-11-21) Wolff On Foursquare

Michael Wolff on the recent Foursquare conference. The opposite, and hardly extreme, position - that the U.S. media business (MSM) is in about the same fix as the Japanese banking system - was not at all part of the discussion. This wasn't, of course, surprising or illogical: If there was such a crisis, then the people here - both on the stage and in the audience - would have been the people who created it. It was therefore not likely that they would now be confessing guilt, or proposing radical overthrow... The panel on Advertising did not ask what happens to the media business if, as almost everyone expects, consumer advertising continues an inexorable process of reaching a dwindling number of people, for more and more money, and effecting the sale of fewer and fewer goods... The panel on news did not talk about what happens if the news audience keeps getting ever older and if, as now seems likely, younger people never develop an interest in news as a part of their daily information routine (Business Models For Information)...