Fabius Maximus enters once more into the breach to try to see what kind of news media will arise from the wreckage of the past 10 years.

The major news media are on a treadmill. Loss of credibility shrinks their audience, hence less revenue, hence reduced funding. Which reduces the quality of their product, hence even less audience. Worse is the loss of advertisers to new media (e.g., Craigslist and Google), which means less revenue, less funding for news collection, and smaller audiences.

I think I've gained a new perspective on news, living as I do, in my self-imposed "low information" universe.

What Fabius doesn't consider is whether we actually need anything to replace the old news media model at all.

Out of a fascination with the carrion bird convergence on the corpse of Michael Jackson, I watched and read some news this week and it was like visiting one's home after a long absence--I saw things I had never really paid attention to.

Out of the hundreds of hours of Michael Jackson coverage, many facts emerged--well, not many, but a handful nonetheless. Jackson was a half billion dollars in debt, which is fascinating, but not really relevant unless you loaned him money. His children were fathered by white men, which is admittedly curious, but pretty much useless information. Anything else? Probably, but just as irrelevant as the rest of it. It seems that I found out everything I needed to know in a fifteen second announcement on the radio while I was driving to Moab last weekend--Michael Jackson, dead at 50.

Its amazing to contemplate the scale of irrelevant coverage with respect to the actual useful news it was based on, and sobering to realize how little we'd miss if the legacy news media suddenly went dark.

Now consider the news coming out of Washington D.C. these days. Sarah Palin announces her resignation and everyone spends the next few days analyzing what she really meant and what the real motivations were. Governor Palin is a pretty straightforward gal, but she operates in a business where no one says what they mean and nothing is as it seems. Have you ever really believed that someone resigned to spend more time with their family?

The useful news in this case was that Sarah Palin had resigned. Everything else was pure conjecture. Once again a case of fifteen seconds of information being spun into several hundred hours of "coverage".

We simply don't need 99.999% of the so-called news that we currently get, and what we do need we get through our social networks. I had several texts about Michael Jackson's death, and saw many comments on Facebook--every single one of them had exactly as much real information in them as I saw from the so-called professional news media. I learned of Sarah Palin's resignation from a Facebook post by Mitt Romney's Facebook group. Information finds you these days--no one has to go looking for it.

I think what people are really saying when the mull over the future of the news media is, "How will the power elite influence the thinking of the nation's citizens without the near universal access they had with the old mass media?"

Things are tough all over.

The future of the news mass media is that it has no future. People are going to get their news the old fashioned way--mouth to ear, but they are going to do it using very high-tech equipment. The vestiges of the old regime will be on-line wonk redoubts (like this one!) where small audiences can read analysis and "expert" opinion.

I'm OK with that.