Ben Compaine analyzes the latest information from the Wall Street Journal on the decline of investments in big media conglomerates: "Last year Adam Thierer and Dan English published a paper, that I wrote about in September. They asked 'If the media market were indeed full of monopolists, wouldn’t a lot of people be investing in media stocks?' In brief, Thierer and English found that Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., Clear Channel, and Comcast lost a combined 52 percent of their value (in terms of market capitalization) over the previous five years.

"The latest evidence along these lines is the recent compilation in The Wall Street Journal identifying the best and worst performing stocks (subscription required). Among the 50 poorest performers were six media companies, four with major holdings in the fading newspaper segment, but also two major broadcasters, including the largest owner of radio stations."

Continuing his essay series on TV News in a Postmodern World Terry Heaton opines on why consumers tune out mass marketers: "Consider the television news industry. If you talk to people who don't watch the news anymore, you'll discover that this hype is one of the big reasons people have walked away. We regularly raise the stakes for viewers on some stories to the life or death level, and they know both intellectually and intuitively that it isn't true. But in declaring it so, we fall into the trap of believing our own hype. We convince ourselves that the story lives up to the tease, and that, folks, is very rarely the case.

"This isn't just the case with TV news. It's everywhere. We're so awash in hyperbole that the only people really to trust are those we choose to be members of our own postmodern tribes — friends, sometimes family, acquaintances, references from friends, people who've 'been there, done that,' and others that we encounter in our day-to-day lives. This is the success of the Diggs and the youTubes of the Media 2.0 space, but it's basic postmodernism..."

Terry continues: "And so technology is allowing people to escape the screaming, and what's the response for companies that need to do business with running customers? It certainly isn't to scream louder. What's needed is a new metaphor to replace the old one, and new metrics upon which to place value in a world of unbundled media. The value will be there, because access to eyeballs (or eardrums) will always have value. But those eyeballs are scattered, knowledgeable, hip to our ways, and highly suspicious. This requires a completely counterintuitive set of metrics and principles."

Jonathan Dube, meanwhile, reports on Yahoo's planned shift from creating original content in favor of content created by users and other media outlets: "The site is not going to cancel its first high-profile efforts at original programming — 'Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,' a series of war reports, and 'Richard Bangs Adventures,' travelogues about unusual locales -- but it is shelving other other initiatives, like a revival of 'The Runner,' an elaborate reality concept Mr. Braun, [the head of Yahoo's Media Group], originally developed for ABC.

Braun, in the NY Times article cited by Jonathan: "I realized I have to check my ego at the door for a moment, and forget whatever expectations people had about me because of my former life, and really take a hard look at who should this business be built for the long term — a business that is not dependent on a series of expensive one-off's to survive."