The digital age isn't necessarily ruining any medium. Newspapers and television are adapting and their content is finding a new audience. No one is suggesting they're unscathed, but they sit atop so much content that it's hard to believe they can't evolve.
Two other media at first blush are more seemingly vulnerable: magazines and radio. Magazines seem far too irregular to sustain digital followings, while radio is facing the rabid file-sharing world and MP3 technology.
But the news from those fronts of late offer some sense of survivalism. Magazines in the U.S. are reporting an 8.1 per cent growth in unique visitors online in 2007 over 2006. That total of about 67.5 million is higher than the 62.8 million UVs enjoyed by newspapers. Magazines reported strong growth in page views and reached nearly 42 per cent of all Web users in the U.S., according to the Nielsen Online survey conducted for the Magazine Publishers of America.
Radio, meanwhile, is undergoing the satellite revolution. But one of its senior executives in the U.S. is predicting a new "killer app" for the medium: song tagging.
Jeff Smulyan, CEO of the Emmis Communications broadcast chain, told a digital radio conference recently that the technology permitting people to identify songs they're hearing for possible future purchase is going to be a big boon to the medium. He predicts that the strength of the FM tuner in iPods will generate momentum for receivers in every cellular phone.