So that quote which went up earlier’s about the news industry, again, and the structural decline in businesses which thought they sold content but actually sold logistics and distribution. That describes, more or less, all of the mass media industries.

On that subject, I’ve recently been preoccupied with a thought-experiment. The basic premise is this: like the quote earlier says, cost-bases are vastly too high across all of the media industries. With those costs as an anchor, there’s no way to make money without the extra margin you got away with thanks to analogue friction. So, you have to cut. However, you’re a big, hairy unionized industry like newsprint, so even if you wanted to, you’re not going to be able to be surgical about it; it’s going to be a long process starting with voluntary redundancy. Ethically I’m right there with them on this, but from a business perspective isn’t that a disaster? Aren’t the people most able to leave likely to be the people best-suited to the new landscape?

My hunch is that voluntary redundancy in the media industries means shedding the people you need and keeping the people who’ll be less able to adapt. You wanted a newsroom of digital natives, but you’re going to keep the people who can’t conceive of anything other than the papers they were brought up on.

Short of blowing the whole thing up, or launching spin-out life-rafts and running down the old businesses, I can’t see how to combat that. The economics are scary, but the brain-drain may be more troubling still.