Prof. Kennedy explains almost everything

My former Boston Phoenix colleague Dan Kennedy is one of the best media thinkers around, and he's got an omnibus post today encompassing the woes of Politicker, the rise of GlobalPost.com (a new online foreign coverage news source), NYT columnist David Carr's suggestion that we need "an iTunes for news," and more generally, the fast-shifting media landscape.

It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's the gist:

As we move rapidly into the post-newspaper era, we're going to see all kinds of experiments — mostly free, some subscription-based, most of which will fail, a few of which will succeed and serve as models for the industry.

The one thing that won't work — and I think Carr would acknowledge this if it were put to him directly — is the notion that newspapers as we have come to know them will somehow be able to charge for their everyday content. That horse left the barn 10 years ago, and it's not coming back.