the "New Media" and how it changes nothing...

Construction Equipment Trader, one of my favorite free magazines to distract my attention from when my wife drives, had a page dedicated to explaining its demise. How sad! I thought. I will miss seeing all the neat equipment that creative Americans dream up and export all over the world; it can only come to reality in this wild, off the chain world of excess that we call home. Only here do we have the two elements necessary to dream big: freedom and a market that rewards creativity.

But alas, Construction Trader isn't gone. It simply moved online. The page explained that five times as many readers were now accessing the online version, and the cost of distributing the paper magazine had just gotten too high. Real buyers needed online information. The paper version was only going to people like me probably, as a diversion.

Remember when Computer Shopper was a 11 x 14 inch large format magazine, 350 pages long? There was so much to report and sell; and in the 80's, no internet...now, who would dream of looking for a used computer in a magazine? Actually, who even looks for used computers anymore? But alas, that is another topic.

So, when TV came along, radio advertising went away. Right? I believe there are more radio channels today than ever in 1940. Same with newspapers...they have had a pretty good run considering that radio was supposed to end their dominance in the 1930's.

We get our information in the way that appeals to us, and is the most efficient; this is the beauty of the American marketplace. F0r example, in a 1939 Popular Mechanics, there is an article about a machine that would replace the mechanism for delivering the daily newspaper. Can you believe that the news magnates of the old order depended on kids on bikes? Amazing. Oh, the machine? A facsimile machine, with both a sending machine and a receiver that worked over a phone line. Sure took a while, but faxes hit their stride in the 80's...because the Japanese needed a way to send their complicated Kanji letters over the wire, and the Japanese word processors weren't there yet...in the 80's a full half of the installed base of fax machines were in Japan alone! This hunger for information is what drives the technology.

So now I read Construction Trader on my laptop with my broadband anywhere hotspot. And I never have to look up when riding shotgun!