Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

by John Cassidy

This didn’t happen by accident. As audiences splintered under the impact of the new media, the remaining mass-market mediums became more valuable, even if their numbers were falling. When Ford wanted to launch a new car, or Paramount Pictures wanted to promote an upcoming movie, they needed to reach the entire country, which wasn’t possible via the Internet. The major networks, while they didn’t deliver as many eyeballs as they had done in the 1970s, still had tens of millions of viewers. USA Today sold more than 2 million copies a day. Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at Carnegie Mellon University, captured what was happening when he wrote, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”