Why decline in news consumption should not surprise anyone
Because there is simply too much information available, online and offline, news and non-news. Period.
Without specific/extreme attention management strategies (like those utilized by Hong Kong newspapers, which are effective but horrible, in my opinion), U.S. newspapers would find it hard to compete with everything else, online and offline, news and non-news.
In this book chapter, I coined the term “information surplus” and used a very simple supply/demand chart to illustrate why “excessive information is available even at the price of zero.”
Information surplus is the cause of the unprecedented crisis facing content producers (e.g,. journalists, writers, musicians, etc.). But it is a reality and can only get worse in this Web 2.0 era.
