I'm Pete Conti, Executive Vice President of Burel Associates. With me is Bob Garfield. Bob is a commentator and analyst for advertising age, a co-host of the Peabody Award-winning MPR program on the media, and the author of the chaos scenario. Bob will be our keynote speaker at the local online advertising conference in New York, March 21st and 22nd of 2012. Welcome Bob. Thank you very much Pete. A lot of people predicting, even yourself I guess, predicting the death of traditional media operations, but history has shown that throughout time new media never completely displaces old media. That's true. I mean has the landscape changed so radically as to make history obsolete? No, history is an obsolete. There has been nothing in history in media equivalent to the digital revolution. This is not the difference from radio to television. This is not the difference between pre-VCR and VCR. It's not even the difference, strictly speaking, between pre-computer and post-computer. What it has to do with is a societal revolution that is plundering media right now along the way to plundering a whole lot of other human enterprises. The digital revolution is akin to the discovery of fire. It's akin to antibiotics, to manned flight, to the automobile, changing human activity in a profound way. And everything else that happened before in history of media since the printing press has been small potato. History does offer some clues, the industrial revolution being right at the top of the list. When we went from an artisan bespoke economy, a single coplar making pair of shoes, to factory made shoes, it changed the lives of pretty much everybody in the world. And the steam engine and the train transportation simultaneously did approximately the same thing. It radically reordered human experience. That's what's going on now. Hyperlocal experiments haven't been able to sustain themselves yet. How can a local media company find a financially sustainable model in such fragmentation? Well, my answer is they probably can't. The mid-s such fragmentation, the combination of incredible fragmentation, which limits your audience size, and the inexorable downward trajectory of advertising prices means that nobody is going to have the critical mass to professionally and profitably deliver news. In my opinion, the future isn't in hyperlocal, per se, as a standalone operation. In my opinion, weirdly, the answer is going to be in consolidation. I believe that in every market, the winner will be the entity, whether it's a local TV station, a public radio station, a local newspaper, a series of hyperlocal sites banded together, or some parties as yet unthought of to form strategic relationships for content and for revenue with other players in that market. The combination of organizations that get there first and create revenue streams while simultaneously becoming the central hub for news and information and culture in their communities, they win. They scoop the pot and everybody else just dists up here. So there, weirdly, paradoxically, this vast, vast fragmentation is going to lead into consolidation, and I believe in market after market after market winner takes all.