Leo Laporte's must watch video on mass media's future (or lack of it)

It's a rainy Saturday morning and what better thing to do than watch This WEEK in TECH host Leo Laporte's marvelous talk about how mass media is dying and what's replacing it.

Leo, who calls his `channel' Twit.tv, talks about how advertisers are no longer willing to pay a king's ransom to reach mass audiences which are minimally engaged with the product or service. He gave the talk at the Online News Association meeting Friday in San Francisco.

Thanks to Google and Yahoo, advertisers can pay far less for more effective focused reach. However, he also talks about how advertisers "smoke [Google's] crack."

Leo has emerged as something of a visionary and is very entertaining. Here's a another taste. A TV exec told him he could not sell ads to smart people because they can't be "tricked" and do their own research. "Now television makes sense, doesn't it," Laporte says to gleeful audience of journalists.

I knew Leo when ZDtv (RIP) was created in 1998 when he was a dynamo there. He's proving that he can still reinvent himself as a broadcaster and now, a podcaster. Ziff Davis, ZDtv's creator, was also my employer at the time when it was a powerful computer and technology publisher. I made numerous appearances on pundit  John Dvorak's tech news commentary show on ZDtv.

For some reason I could not embed the video and I would implore PaidContent.org to simplify its cluttered video player. That said, thanks for carry Leo's Terrific talk. Click here to the watch video.

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This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com