Via Doc Searls, I ran across this interview with Warren Buffet. They asked him a few questions about the newspaper business, and his answers are applicable to a range of news and entertainment venues:

Certain newspaper executives are going out and investing on other newspapers. I don’t see it. It’s hard to make money buying a business that’s in permanent decline. If anything, the decline is accelerating. Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while newspaper non-readers are just getting out of college. The old virtuous circle, where big readership draws a lot of ads, which in turn draw more readers, has broken down.

He's definitely got that right, and most of the media people seem utterly oblivious to it. My daughter doesn't even consider the newspaper as an information source; she hits the web first (and pretty much only). With TV, she doesn't really have brand loyalty - the DVRs have changed that. Heck, I don't have any left for TV either - I have no idea what day, time, or network most of the shows I watch are on. For me, shows live in the "recorded" bin.

The same thing is happening with movies. Some people like to claim that movie attendance would go back up, if only the studios would go back to making better a product. I seriously doubt that, and I doubt that - in general - movies are worse (or better) than they were during any arbitrarily chosen "golden age". Before TV, there were no choices other than movies (ok, radio - but the difference was stark). Now there's TV, the stuff on your DVR, the internet, various video games (on a variety of devices) - there are simply more ways to stay entertained, and most of them don't involve getting up, driving to the multiplex, buying over-priced popcorn, and hoping that the audience remembers that they aren't in their own living room.

The entertainment business is now a whole slew of niche choices, and it's never going back to a unitary movie night. The same is true of TV and "must see" evenings - between the web, game systems, and DVRs, that's over too.

A lot of media execs could stand to learn this, and reading the entire interview with Buffet would be a great place to start.

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