From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

Brooke Gladstone is away this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

What follows will be an ominous look at an extremely familiar media institution.

But first, buzzword time.

We have lots of talk about disruption this morning. Companies taking old-fashioned industries

and shaking them up. The digital era has disrupted the business of journalism, as many

if you know. One of the hottest startups disrupting the industry.

What I call digital disruption. Nowadays, it means positive radical change, which is swell if you're not the one being

disrupted.

For instance, what if you'd cornered the children's shoelaces market when Velcro came along?

Or what if you were a symphony orchestra living off the subscriptions of rapidly aging and steadily expiring music lovers?

What if you were a carmaker and consumers wished to shop directly from the factory?

You couldn't allow it because that would cut your current customers, the dealers you depend on, out of the deal.

Or worse, what if the biggest dealers started selling brands of their own?

Any of these scenarios could be ruinous.

Put them all together and you have the existential threat variety pack, technological, competitive,

demographic, and internesson.

And every last one of them applies to...

You're listening to NPR.

Yes, the nation's largest producer and distributor of public media is being buffeted from all sides,

because the space it once monopolized is now packed with an ever-growing number of competitors

...