The Shift

It's easy to see when large institutions decline, but sometimes harder to see what's really happening to kill them. In all the hype about music swapping supposedly killing the music business, or Google News scavenging the newspaper business, this essay by Jesse Kornbluth illustrates one piece of the huge economic shift underway, enabled by the Internet. For every Tower Records that goes out of business, there are dozens of new channels of information and distribution that spring up, providing more flexible and personalized access to media.