The Great Unbundling: Newspapers and the Net

As the Internet becomes our universal medium, it is reshaping what might be called the economics of culture. Because most common cultural goods consist of words, images, or sounds, which all can be expressed in digital form, they are becoming as cheap to reproduce and distribute as any other information product. Many of them are also becoming easier to create, thanks to the software and storage services provided through the Net and inexpensive production tools like camcorders, microphones, digital cameras and scanners. The flood of blogs, podcasts, video clips and MP3s, most available for free, testifies to the changed economics.

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