Whither the tycoons?Wither the tycoons.

Reaction and followup to the post below on the absence of the business side of the house in this discussion:

To clarify, I wasn't denegrating navel-gazing and hand-wringing. Those are positive things in our house, but not everyone sees it that way.

Replying to Jay Rosen's comment, though, I expanded a bit on what I was trying to say there.

Henry Copeland (responding to the Glaser article at PressThink) indirectly answers the question:

Corporate publishers can't think or act outside the box, BECAUSE THEY ARE THE BOX.

But, I don't entirely agree with the implications he draws from that:

But don't despair. This is a good thing. Who needs overhead and overhang and overlords? Isn't disaggregation -- not just of content but of bodies -- the trend?

The many to many blogosphere is far more powerful than any one-to-many top-down distribution mechanisms schemed up by corporate media. Blog swarms are smarter than any editorial board. Blogging tools are cheaper than a six-pack of beer. Bandwidth is sold at pennies per supertanker. And advertisers are waking up to the fact that it's more fun to pay writers directly rather than shareholders & publishers & flunkies & flunkies of flunkies, aka writers.

Isn't the playing field leveling now... or even tilting toward the individual?

The playing field is certainly levelling, but I don't think we're at the tipping point yet. Believe me, if I thought that we could get away without spending on a bunch of reporters and editors, and still achieve what we want to do -- I would. Pure Citizens' Journalism can deliver a lot of things the MSM can't -- but I don't see it being comprehensive.

That's where a hybrid model brings the fourth and fifth estates together. The argument that the blogosphere would starve without the MSM may be a little tired, but there's also a little something there.

And while I agree with the noble concept of advertisers paying writers instead of shareholders, we're a ways away from that happening on a large scale. It's a valid concept, but anyone who's ever sold advertising knows that most advertising isn't just bought. It's, well, sold. And the ethical quandries of the individual content creator selling ads aside, I imagine its not what most like to do.

The idea of a publishing company isn't dead yet. It needs to change, sure, or it will be. But there is market benefit in aggregation. It's embracing and even encouraging disintermediation while being an agrregator that's where it's at.

For what it's worth, I get the sense from some of the correspondence I'm getting that some folks look at as as some sort of purely beneficent experiment. Let me be clear: We're capitalists. We want to have a hand in building the "next box." We just want to hardwire into our culture the  notion that the best thing we can do from that point forward is to look for productive and beneficial ways to destroy our own model.