Golden Oldies

[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Peter Chernin, News Corp]
[Commentary] Traditional media is not dead. In fact, our companies are leading the charge into the networked digital future. The media industry stands at the dawn of a new golden age -- fueled on the demand side by ever-more discerning consumers, and on the supply side by fresh thinking, new products and oceans of new content. Our businesses were built on our ability to enlighten, entertain and educate -- whether through the pages of a novel, the images on a screen, or the facts in a news broadcast. We exist to connect masses of people with compelling content. Yet throughout history, our power to achieve that mass connection has been limited by distribution constraints -- prohibitive costs, hard-to-reach locations, sluggish technology, etc. Even as media companies grew and thrived, complete access to a truly global audience was long out of reach. We can now reach almost anyone, anywhere, at any time, through a wide variety of devices. This new reality of ubiquitous low-cost distribution gives us more ways than ever to tell our stories and get them to an audience. The mass digital conversion of the past 10 years puts consumers at the very heart of media. They program. They timeshift. They manipulate. And perhaps most significantly, they interact and engage -- they have been liberated from the constraints of the old analog world. That liberated consumer is bringing about what can and should be the golden age for the so-called old media.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113945405858969177.html?mod=todays_us_op...
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