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 seance.”