Your standing on a train track, shoelaces tied up in the rails. A pair of scissors in your hand and a train barreling down on you….

Do you cut your shoelaces and run or do you stand there an hold your arms up for the train to stop?

You standing on the tracks is your industry or status quo for that matter.                  Your shoelaces are the losses you need to cut and the train…

The train is the internet and it is a force that grows stronger everyday.

First, we saw it with the music industry. Bit torrent file sharing turned every computer into a music storage device and now it is the News industry that is in flux. I see video from conferences, one after another on “New Media” and what the media landscape will look like in the next 20 years. 

It’s a little sad if you think about it. A bunch of rich media moguls desperately holding onto their printing presses and satellite trucks.

The thing they seemingly can’t admit is that they aren’t actually in the News business. They are in the content delivery business and that business is no longer about scarcity. It is about customization. 

Journalism is in fact thriving with the ability to publish being so ubiquitous.                   Yes, there is still 10X more crap then there is quality but that will change as people figure out how to create community around their content and leverage that community to drive revenue. 

It’s not really about the News media or Music or the Movie Industry that is most likely the next to go. This is the case for every industry, big or small, foreign or domestic.

The internet is the model and your business a platform on top of it. Act accordingly.