In his essay Death to the Mass Jeff Jarvis develops an argument he has been making for years. Treating the public as “a mass” and giving them a “one-way, one-size-fits-all product” is no longer appropriate. I’m totally with him on that. It is just one reason why newsprint national newspapers in Britain, the epitome of mass-marketing, are increasingly viewed as irrelevant by readers (and the people who want to reach them: advertisers).
Here’s Jarvis: “What has died is the mass-media business model — injuring, perhaps mortally, a host of institutions it symbiotically supported: publishing, broadcasting, mass marketing, mass production, political parties, possibly even our notion of a nation. We are coming at last to the end of the Gutenberg Age.” By contrast, Facebook connects people with people while Google gives people the option to go directly to what they want, and not what newspaper editors (aka information gatekeepers) tell them they should want.
For the full story read Roy Greenslade in The Guardian