Yesterday found us wrestling with the disaster that is the American print periodical business, and, in particular with the droves of newly unemployed, or underemployed writers and other ‘creatives.’ I opined that the problem isn’t that writers are no longer appreciated, it’just that the 175-year-old print media business is going down the well-worn path of irrelevance to a changed world.

That process started the day the first Apache web server was put on the internet: the cost of publishing, once measured in the tens of millions of dollars for presses, labor contracts, distribution networks, paper, ink, and, oh yeah, writers fell dramatically.

Suddenly, with the barrier of high-cost production gone, anybody could publish, and 26.4 million blogs have appeared in the U.S. alone, boasting some 78 million unique visitors (aka ‘readers’) according to figures cited by Technorati.

Clearly, market economics are at work here: the amount of verbiage available to readers has grown explosively, from perhaps a few hundred sources to tens of millions, which has the effect of making ‘content’ extremely cheap, not a good thing if you’re a writer looking for a paycheck.

It turns out that there are a lot of people who are pretty good writers, commentators and reporters, and with tens of millions bloggers cranking out copy, readers are likely to find just the viewpoint or topics they crave.

So, we former employees of print and, even, add-supported online media, now find ourselves in the unemployment line with auto workers, steel workers and everybody else whose job evaporated in the New Economy. Creative destruction in action, in spades. Thus we have become ‘malcontent providers’ and ‘discontent’ providers, terms coined by Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller, my former editor at the late, lamented NewsForge. To be continued…

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