Dead businesses

Great article on Fortune.com (or whatever URL it becomes once I type that in) on dead businesses. I agree that there are a lot of BS artists out there and Stanley Bing lists some of the crap that they will spew regarding dead businesses/industries:

* The theater
* Movies in movie houses
* Public schools
* Radio, because of satellite radio,
* Satellite radio, because of Internet radio and ITunes
* Broadcast television, because of cable and Internet video
* Cable television, because of satellite TV and Internet video
* Satellite television, because of digital television conversion and Internet video
* Internet video, because of digital television conversion and downloading
* DVDs, because of downloading
* Downloading, because of the ubiquity of broadband streaming
* Personal computers with hard drive capacity, due to cloud computing
* Land-line telephones, because they’re so 20th Century
* Any internet company that is not Google (GOOG), for obvious reasons
* Google, because, well, how long can they keep THIS up?
* Books, of course
* Magazines, except the ones that we’re on the cover of, and…
* Newspapers

The crux of his article is about newspapers and the growing belief that they are a dead business. My personal belief isn't that they are dead, but just being adjusted as we grow through the internet. Do I think the days of the two-newspaper cities are coming to an end (aside from NYC)? Yeah. Do I think newspapers will dry up and die? No. Stanley goes on to defend newspapers and why he thinks they won't die:

* I like newspapers. I look at a few every day and even read some of each;
* I don’t believe everything I read in the paper, but I’m interested in what they think is interesting;
* Newspapers have been around a long time, from medieval days through the time of Horace Greeley (above) and beyond. Radio didn’t kill them. TV didn’t kill them. The internet will not kill them;
* If there were no newspapers, all we’d have is the Internet, whose capacity for the promulgating and dispensation of bulls**t is unparalleled;
* I am NOT interested in a PERSONAL, daily e-mail informing me only of the stuff I pre-select as of interest to me. What’s the pleasure in that?
* If we all had a euro for every article in some medium that declared another medium dead, we’d all be Europeans;
* Aggregators can only aggregate content if there is content to aggregate. No content, no aggregators;
* Contrary to popular belief, journalism is an actual profession that takes training, talent and skill, and one of the most rigorous and necessary places in which it’s pursued is in newspapers;
* 89% of all citizen-journalists are just full of it.