What role does and will "traditional" media play

As more and more people find their news and gossip through blogs, YouTube videos, Wikipedia (to some extent), and other user-created media, a question arises: what role will "traditional" play in informing and influencing the public. Publishing an idea online requires little effort which makes it easy to share your creation with millions of people in a short amount of time. Online media further challenges print media to be more relevant and more succinct, yet print media faces several challenges. One of these challenges was outlined in a recent article Economist article entitled "The Future of Books" which sparked my attention.

With non-fiction the situation is more nuanced. Many non-fiction books express an intellectual idea. Traditionally, the only way to deliver such an idea profitably involved binding it into a 300-page book, says Seth Godin, a blogger and author of eight books on marketing. “If you had a 50-page idea, you couldn't make any money from it,” he says, so a lot of non-fiction books end up on shelves with 250 unread pages. Freedom from such rigidities may save a lot of authorial time.

This might suggest print media may have to become more flexible and allow "shorthand" publications and move more towards a hybrid of books, magazines, and blogs. Perhaps print media may also move towards encouraging an increased volume of such shorter "50-page ideas" and use on-demand printing technologies. Users can then choose to view a synopsis or sample of the "publication" and make a buy decision based on that. The publication could then be printed on demand or delivered to the user electronically. Based on a rolling 8-week (arbitrarily selected) average, book stores might order quantities of these "shorthand" publications to stock in their brick and mortar stores.

Just an idea.