Some sad news hit the world of print reporting yesterday when the Washington Post announced it would be closing its outpost bureaus in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.  The move was made by the Post (rightly so) because the publishers of the paper in our nation’s capital want to focus on covering DC better than anyone else. 

Since the Washington Times is both awful and unprofitable, I’m inclined to think that the Post is facing good odds.  Hey, sometimes it is best to set the bar low.

But, the closing and refocusing announced by the Post made me think about how the world is getting smaller.  Big media conglomerates are facing serious pressures to get smaller.  GE’s NBC Universal will inevitably be sold to Comcast because Comcast specializes in content.  To GE, NBC is just another in a million of their businesses and it has become tougher to turn a profit doing it, despite what they tell us about The Jay Leno Show.

On the digital front, the proliferation of niche or microniche websites has proven mightily successful.  There are now digital papers for people of every political persuasion - or perversion. 

I work for a sports blog company that produces very specific niche blogs.  We don’t do “all sports” like Deadspin or “all NBA” like Ball Don’t Lie at Yahoo.  SB Nation is more specific than that, though I do a blog about golf.  Golf is a niche.

Combine the two together and you get HuffPo Sports, accurately described as sports for casual fans.  I think it’s a great tagline, even if it never gets adopted by Arianna Huffington.  Why?  Because it is a clear niche - an easy to understand identity.

See, that’s the route that the world is taking toward uniqueness and individuality.  The Internet’s evolution has granted a feeling of self-importance and instant customization to every user.  In return, they expect to be greeted by and lured into sites that meet their individual needs.  People want to be able to access content and their version of the truth on their own terms, and they will shun anything that doesn’t allow them to do that.

Certainly not everyone has realized this power that the digital age has granted them, but clearly more people are turning that way.  RSS was just the beginning although I still love it madly.  Web 1.0 was about getting content en masse to you.  Web 2.0 was (is?) about you getting content en masse out to the world.  Web 3.0 will put the two together to connect you and your content to the world’s content instantly in a highly customized fashion.

That idea seemingly destroys the notion that a digital conglomerate is possible.  With so many individuals seeking to spew content (using that loosely), how could a powerful digitial media conglomerate exist?  Will there never be the GE of the Web?

No, hardly.  It’s just that it’s going to take a lot more effort to do it.  Conglomerates will no longer exist as one big, visible umbrella hovering over each piece of the empire.  Rather, the conglomerate will become a part of the background - a hidden cash register behind the content that has been devised, tested, and created to be loved by certain groups.  The conglomerate will have to have more voices willing to work at lower pay for the right to be recognized by a larger population.  It’ll be a trade off for writers and producers to join these entities.  Yes, there will be faster fame and recognition, but at a financial price.

That is precisely what the little guys will resist.  They’ll resist having to give in to partnerships, bonding, and Web symbiosis.  We all want to do things organically and on our own.  Many of us will be able to do that.  A lot of us will not and either will give up or be sucked up by companies that can promise us what we want - well, almost everything.

In the end, the balance that writers will have to likely strike is maintaining multiple, different voices behind the shield of a digital media conglomerate.  Journos won’t be writing one blog, one way.  They might write two or three with completely different styles.  The ability to be a literary chameleon will be a highly valued skill.

The same will be true for the conglomerate.  Their initial success will rely on their ability to understand their existing audiences and cater content to those varied groups.  Their survival will depend on being able to concoct new audiences from existing and previously untapped ones at a moment’s notice - and keeping their attention longer than that flash in time.