Remember the newspaper Advice Columnist?

So i just finished reading Clay Shirkey's excellent treatise on the demise of the newspaper industry. Its pretty long, has over 850 comments at last look, but is literally a must-read.

His thesis is that the printing press was the best way to get in-depth information out to a mass audience. Printing presses were expensive. Only a few companies could afford them. So in any given town, you had just a few newspapers running these expensive beasts. Also, co-incidentally because it was a mass media, you could sell display ads. It was permanent! Not transient like radio or TV. You could always keep your newpaper hanging around for days, weeks, months, or even years.

Also, because it was the only game in town, display advertising was expensive!!! So the newspapers -- incidentally -- were able to pay reporters handsomely to do the kind of investigative journalism from Brooklyn to Baghdad. Good stories sold more newspapers! Could this ever end? Yup, along came the internet.

In this newspaper, you had:

* The News (tm)
* Classifieds
* Personals
* Advice Columnists
* Sections such as travel, technology, gadgets, stocks, business, etc.

Check it out... all those things are better done by other websites now. Except for news, we could never stop counting the number of websites who have taken over all the other sections of a newspaper. So, predictably, circulation drops, less people want to buy a physical newspaper now. Ever worse, all those revenue streams are now being done much better by websites.

You don't have to write into the Advice Columnist in a newspaper, and wait a week to hope that your letter gets published by Dear Abby, instead you can head over to Funadvice and post it right away. Get it pushished right away, and get advice in as little as a few minutes.

Ditto for classifieds (craigslist.org), personals (match.com), technology (engadget.com). Why the heck do we even need a newspaper now? Yeah, that pesky thing called the news. Inarguably, they've built up great and famous newsrooms on the back of that display ad revenue.

So, you're thinking I'm contradicting my last post her, but no. There is nothing that says that newspapers can be the only places that have great newsrooms. Many internet sources do that these days. TV is getting better and better. And lots of smaller news sites are starting up HuffPost, TPM Media, Politico, etc.

The role that newspapers used to play is going to get more fragmented now. Instead of buting a 50 cent paper in the morning to get a little piece of it all, you'll log into maybe 20 websites during the course of the day to get all of it together in one place. Each one of those places will be better then that section of the newspaper. There's no way that the NYTimes can compete with Engadget.com for technology news.

So is this a good thing? Are we losing that shared consciousness that newspapers used to give us? Yes. At some point, in the U.S. we had just 4 or 5 TV channels, the big networks. That shared consciousness dissapeared completely around 10 years ago. A similar thing is happening to the newspapers now.

Information sources are gonna get more fragmented. This is truly the era when its no longer in the hands of any one person.

I, for one, am trembling with excitement, and welcome my new Internet overlords.