Changes at Gannett and McGraw-Hill Mirror Shift in American's Entertainment Preferences

It is an undeniable fact that the number of entertainment options available to Americans at any given moment has grown exponentially over the last decade or so, and it's just as clear that we embrace these choices wholeheartedly. From burgeoning cable lineups to the Internet to the devices that connect us all, many facets of our everyday lives look a lot different than they did even in the 2000s. If these changes weren't already as obvious as the nose on your Facebook profile picture, a couple of corporate bombshells in the early days of summer 2011 reinforced the wild new flood of entertainment options that we're all both forging and fording.

First, publishing McGraw-Hill announced that it is selling off its broadcasting unit, which includes several local television stations across the country. McGraw-Hill has been the quiet hand behind some of the most beloved network affiliates, like WRTV-6 in Indianapolis, since 1972, even though most people associate the company with its textbook business. According to McGraw-Hill's public statement, the stations are still quite profitable as a group, but the publisher apparently wants to focus on global properties with the potential for better growth. The message lying just beneath that sentiment seems to be that McGraw-Hill needs to get out while the stations are still worth something. With the proliferation of online sources, including blogs and forums that give us news before it's even news, TV stations have lost a lot of the appeal as community criers that they held in the past. Who wants to wait for the "News at Six" to find out what's happening with the Indianapolis Colts when team owner Jim Irsay is Tweeting right to your timeline all day long?

On the heels of this news, another publisher, Gannett, announced that it was laying off 700 people from its newspaper division. This move affects about 80 local newspapers across the nation, though it won't touchUSA Today, another Gannett holding. Gannett cites a very soft market for advertiser revenue, particularly among local businesses. This comes at a time when online advertising revenue is setting records, fueled by consumers' increasing Internet usage. It's hardly a surprising scenario that we find ourselves facing, since many of us spend virtually our entire days online in some fashion or another. If you don't work in front of a computer at your job, you almost certainly carry a cell phone with you everywhere, and it's probably "smart" enough to let you browse the web. When we get home at night, many of us reach for the laptop before we reach for the TV remote and certainly before we grab the newspaper to see what happened yesterday.

Our world has changed rapidly over the last few years, and it continues to evolve on a day-to-day basis. Many giants of the corporate world have been somewhat slow to respond, leading to sudden, cataclysmic events like those recently announced by McGraw-Hill and Gannett. As our entertainment and news options continue to evolve, we almost certainly will witness other drastic moves designed to keep up with our mercurial tastes. It should be very interesting to see how we're spending our time in another five years.