On bundling and basketball

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Jan. 29, 2009, 2:22 p.m.

From the Personal Anecdote Dept.: This isn’t a typical post here at the Lab. But below is six minutes of my somewhat rambling thoughts about how the future of newspapers can truly only be understood by watching bootleg college basketball on a laptop on a frozen Boston night while contemplating my cable bill. (More seriously, it’s about product bundling, and how Internet distribution disrupts the business models of companies based on it. It’s also about how newspapers have traditionally controlled all of the links in the value chain, and that they have to figure out how to react when different parts of that chain face different disruptions.)

Links mentioned in the video: my cable company, Hulu, Mininova, Wikipedia on product bundling, and Nick Carr on “the great unbundling” of newspapers.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).

POSTED Jan. 29, 2009, 2:22 p.m.

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