• by Joe Mandese , February 25, 2010

It’s a question on most of our minds, right? Turns out Saul Hansell, Programming Director at AOL’s seed.com has the answer. And, apparently, it’s the fact that we’ve simply given consumers too much choice.

 

“Why is the media business collapsing,” he said during the OMMA Behavioral content farmers panel, “Because the supply of things you can read have increased multifold.”

 

In other words, people have too much stuff to choose from, and they’re choosing to spend their time with things other than the most professionally produced media content.

 

Okay, I get that. But what I don’t get is Hansell’s solution to the problem, which is to “do to journalism what China did to the toy industry.”

 

Yikes! Seriously, this guy has a plan for a “Starbuck’s model” for journalism: assigning semi-professional journalists to supply a multitude of content that is much more niche than anything professional content companies could possibly imagine.

 

For the upcoming South By Southwest Festival, for example, Hansell is assigning stringers to interview all of the thousand odd bands that will be participating in the festival.

 

And they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Turns out, the blogosphere is worth a thousand bands.