MOVIES? NEWSPAPERS? Over, Gone, Kaput !

And anyone who has been following the media and entertainment aspects of pop culture over the last 2, 3 years has seen the handwriting on the screen. The NYTimes just laid off 500 employees, and India is now out producing the US for the world market and with smaller countries uping their production.
John Dvorak who does a column for PC Magazine has an on target take which no one else will even get near.

Here's the beginning of his column in which he discusses movies, then later in the column wades in on newsprint.

"There are two important institutions that are about to be decimated by technology: newspapers and movies. It won't be pretty.

The biggest impact technology has had on any social institution is moviegoing. I think moviegoing is doomed to die off slowly unless Hollywood can come up with a reasonable new experience. As it now stands, I can feed an HDTV signal into a standard Toshiba LCD projector through the composite video ports and blow out a 100-inch 16:9 image on a screen and get a theater experience in the home. With progressive scan or line-doubling DVD players, the experience is phenomenal. Use a DLP theater projector or a large-screen plasma display, and you're in heaven.

So why do I now want to go to the theater? Do I want to go because it's more expensive than a DVD rental? Do I want to go for the greasy popcorn coated with trans-fat butter-flavored oil? Do I want to go so I can hear cell phones going off all over the place and people yakking on them? Do I want to go because most of the movies aren't shown on large screens at all, but in boxcar-sized rooms with screens not much bigger than my projector screen at home? Do I want to go because the sound is turned too loud and pumped through a mediocre audio system?

The only reason you may want to go is if you can see the big-screen version of the movie and the movie has big-screen impact. In Europe and Asia they still have massive theaters with screens as huge as the ones in the old American drive-ins, a real event and a real group experience. In the United States this is rare, the exception in most instances. Somewhere along the line the economics of movie distribution changed and all these multiplex theaters cropped up. The grand palace was done. Most have shut down or have been transformed into old-fashioned stage/concert theaters.

The movie business has been impinged upon a couple of times. The first was by radio and the entertainment that radio drama provided. Adding sound to movies was an easy fix. When television came along, the movie folks rolled out Cinemascope and wide screens. Other gimmicks such as Cinerama, 70-mm film, and IMAX added to the reasons to get out of the house.

Read on here...

hat tip Andrew Sullivan