I was just read­ing Vin Cros­bie’s latest post in which he repeats the line that news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tion has been fall­ing for 30 years. (Leo Bog­art noted that it was 1971 when total US news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tion dropped below total num­ber of house­holds.) Since the 1980s TV has been facing sim­ilar decline.

Cros­bie says it’s all about con­tent. But look at the last fun­da­mental advert­ising plat­form revolu­tion in media, when national TV arrived in the 1960s. It swept away mater­ial for which it offered no dir­ect replace­ment at all, except — under legis­lat­ive man­date — news. The shift online is not a dis­place­ment process.

In The Power and the Profits, David Hal­ber­stam wrote this on the advert­ising implic­a­tions of nation­ally net­worked pro­gram­ming:

The pos­sib­il­it­ies of nation­wide advert­ising on tele­vi­sion trans­formed the nature of Amer­ican com­mu­nic­a­tions. After­noon news­pa­pers began to atrophy and die. Large-circulation magazines, which up until then had been the main con­duit of mass advert­ising — for razor blades, beer, tires, cars, main house­hold goods — could not com­pete with tele­vi­sion for advert­ising or audi­ences. Within a few years many of them were dead.

A new mass audi­ence was eager for mass enter­tain­ment: along with it came new dimen­sions in hard-sell mass advert­ising. It was all big­ger, and reached more and more people, and the qual­ity was pitched just a few notches lower. Dra­matic changes in the rela­tion­ship of pro­grams to spon­sors marked the trend.

Hal­ber­stam, incid­ent­ally, called the inform­a­tion part of that revolu­tion — TV news — “the national séance.”