The perils of print

I took this from a post Jason Calacanis made recently. He's been railing on a guy from Wired who wanted to interview Jason, but the journalist refused to conduct the interview. Jason stuck to his guns, citing the fact that it's way too easy to misquote someone in a vocal interview, but damn near impossible when conducted via email.

And while all of that is good and fine, it lead Jason to this path:

What this is really all about at the end of the day is that WIRED the print magazine--like other magazines and newspapers--are lost and adrift because they can't break stories any more. WIRED is six weeks old when you open it, hundreds of people read my blog posts minutes after they come out. It's impossible for print publications to have a "breaking news" role anymore, and they are certainly not going to be able to keep stories under wraps for six weeks when 90% of their subjects have blogs that are starved for content.

He's right on the money. While there still exists a large amount of people who want the packaging, gatekeeping and convenience of print, those hungriest for breaking news will soon discover (or have already discovered) much more effective was at gathering their information. The same will happen to other traditional media outlets, including TV and radio. The times, they are a changing.