The last time I posted to the BlackBox blog was 11/07.   At that time, the Dow was pushing 13,000, the real estate market was still booming and some investors still had interest in buying newspapers.  Oh yes, an African American was elected as our Commander and Chief about 40 years after a person of color could legally be denied basic human rights just across the Potomac.   Other than that, nothing much has changed.  

I have always been a Thomas Friedman fan but he really nailed it in his Op-Ed in the NY Times 3/7 where he cites Paul Gilding’s book “The Great Disruption”.  He basically states that our global economic system is, simply stated, unsustainable and that there had to be an inflection point where a correction, or as he puts it, a “disruption” occurs.  He states that 2008 will be looked at by historians as that inflection point where the world was hit it the head by a 2×4, and while still staggering, we are already starting to come to our senses about what needs to change NOW before we do permanent damage to the world we live in from an economic and environmental standpoint on a global scale.  

There is a great deal of cautious optimism in this line of thought because perhaps all things needed to implode before they could be made better.  Gilder writes…”When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’  Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker - the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.”

I lay no claim to be a paragon or proxy for anything but I would like to think that our efforts at BlackBox Media might some day be viewed as playing a role, no matter how infinitesimal, of being part of the solution that preserved newspaper’s role in our society as we know it.  The newspaper industry will undoubtedly be very different from how it went in to this miasma but I am hopeful that its relevance and the vital role it plays in free society will not be diminished.   

With the issues faced not only by newspapers but all traditional local media coming to a head, I find it interesting that the very people who seemed so eager to hasten their demise now defends them.  IMHO, the realization finally hit that if the newspaper industry was further crippled or if major metropolitan newspapers start going away, where would the “free” internet press get credible unbiased news? 

Could it be that all the online “disintermediatarians” need newspapers to survive?  I don’t have that answer but would like to think that a society without unbiased editorial content could easily become “tribal”…where everything like them is good and anything different s bad.  That would not only be sad but I don’t want to think where that leads if you follow that path through to its logical evolution. 

If you’ve gotten this far, I must have struck a chord.  I would be interested in hearing from you.  Fire when ready!  

Regards,

David A. Teitler - CEO BlackBox Media  

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Opinion and Perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.