Providing information over only a very fleeting period of time is not a characteristic that our existing news media can hope to alter.  It is central to their business that they keep changing what they present. This means that their audience must watch or read at more or less the same time. 

If these outlets operated according to any different principles, they would no longer be broadcasts or periodicals.  

They would be more like videocassettes.

Far from requiring everyone to watch at the same time, the video business strongly hopes we do not.  Video stores make much more money when people watch at different times, because staggered viewing over time enables the stores to meet consumer demand with a proportionately smaller investment in cassettes (i.e., they have more rentals per cassette in which to generate a profit).

Cassettes also stay on the shelves of video stores for pretty much as long as the public shows interest in them.  This broader time span of availability fits better with public interest in political communication.

Another advantage of video over, say, television for political communication is that video doesn’t place the same economic demands on its producers to "swing for the fences" of audience share that TV does. 

In television, income from advertisers goes up as viewership increases, while costs remain pretty much the same no matter how many people are watching.   This means that getting a large or small audience equates directly to generating a large or small return on investment.  For obvious reasons, nobody wants a small one.

With video, costs can be held down simply by producing fewer copies—meaning that profits can be quite satisfactory on far less broadly-watched material. The trick is just to base the size of the production run on a realistic estimate of viewer demand.

Thus, even though political communications will never be as widly popular as the latest "hot" sitcom, they can still be entirely profitable.