Dvorak Says Newspapers and Movies are Fading Fast (Read: Doomed)

Well, he has never been shy:

There are two important institutions that are about to be decimated by technology: newspapers and movies. It won’t be pretty.

The biggest impact technology has had on any social institution is moviegoing. I think moviegoing is doomed to die off slowly unless Hollywood can come up with a reasonable new experience. As it now stands, I can feed an HDTV signal into a standard Toshiba LCD projector through the composite video ports and blow out a 100-inch 16:9 image on a screen and get a theater experience in the home. With progressive scan or line-doubling DVD players, the experience is phenomenal. Use a DLP theater projector or a large-screen plasma display, and you’re in heaven.

So why do I now want to go to the theater? Do I want to go because it’s more expensive than a DVD rental? Do I want to go for the greasy popcorn coated with trans-fat butter-flavored oil? Do I want to go so I can hear cell phones going off all over the place and people yakking on them? Do I want to go because most of the movies aren’t shown on large screens at all, but in boxcar-sized rooms with screens not much bigger than my projector screen at home? Do I want to go because the sound is turned too loud and pumped through a mediocre audio system?

The only reason you may want to go is if you can see the big-screen version of the movie and the movie has big-screen impact.

….. Now with the DVD and the so-called home theater, the average experience is simply better at home. You can stop the movie when you want. You can eat dinner while watching. You can pause the movie and examine a scene more closely. The only thing you really miss is the group experience of sitting in an audience with a hundred or more strangers who react to the film, which is an important form of socialization. Of course, that experience has to be balanced by the idiot with the hat sitting in front of you or the girl who keeps getting up every five minutes to go to the bathroom or make a call.

In the 1950s and 1960s, during the waning years of the traditional big theater with loge seating, there even used to be ushers who could throw people out of the theater. Nowadays in most venues, if an usher ever showed up, he’d be beaten and stripped.

Also, in case you haven’t noticed, they are starting to bring the release of the DVD closer and closer to the release of the movie. This means that eventually they will be released at the same time, and only the most spectacular movies will get any attendance.

Then he goes to work on newspapers:

….. another American institution is under attack simultaneously: the printed newspaper. Newspapers, once fat and happy with local ads and classifieds, have all bloated up, with too many staffers producing a minimal amount of content per person.

….. This was justifiable when the newspapers were rolling in dough, but craigslist has probably sunk the business, with free classified advertising that is far more useful and functional than anything delivered by any newspaper. There was a lot of money made by the classifieds. That money is gone. Nobody knows how the newspapers can recover. Nobody.

Finally, he points out that their fates are intertwined:

Curiously, many newspapers rely on big income from movie advertising. There goes another income stream, as that business begins to fade. Another irony is that today’s newspapers report celebrity gossip as a form of news, helping to prop up the Hollywood machine. And since newspapers and their movie reviews help pump up sales of blockbuster films, we have an interesting chicken-and-egg dilemma. What got eaten first? The chicken or the egg? We are essentially going to watch two American institutions shrink or fragment into new forms that will probably resemble their earliest iterations, both small by today’s standards.

Meanwhile, the newspaper publishers are clueless as to what they might do to stop the bleeding and Hollywood is more concerned about digital rights management than they are about their own future. Hey, guys. There is a huge locomotive headed your way. Take a look!

He didn’t even get around to mentioning that just about anyone with a little equipment and talent can make a presentable movie now, and anyone with a computer can publish a blog or some other form of online content.

It does not look good for the news and movie dinos, which is a sobering thought to ponder while at the “Serenity” sneak preview tonight.