Legacy media is doomed.
If legacy media doesn't change, it is doomed.
No, I'm not talking about the constant media circus on 24-hour "news"
channels -- we already know that they aren't sustainable in the face of
actual many-to-many communications on the Net. Nor is it about the
"troll-for-$$" business model of "talk" radio, as well as less savory web
sites.
No, I'm talking about the traditional outlet for "respectable news" -- newspapers.
I don't know if you've noticed, but newspapers aren't doing so well
nowadays. From where I'm sitting, it looks to me that there are a couple of
reasons for this:
1) Newspapers in these United States have shackled themselves to a
for-profit motive. Because indeed, the very bottom line with newspapers is
to maximize ROI.
2) Newspapers are run, and largely staffed, by people who grew up in a
United States where they were the arbiters of what constituted "news" -- a model that has been eroding for over 18 years.
Eighteen (18) years ago, I was lucky enough to end up working at a community
college, one of three in California to be connected to the Internet. I
started with access to an HP Unix system, running a vital command-line tool
called "rn". Short for "(r)ead (n)ews", this was my client to connect to the Usenet,
which remains the world's largest distributed "bulletin board
system". Today, people have relatively easy access to much of the Usenet (but
not all of it) through "Google Groups". And I daresay that many savvy
Internet old-timers still use the Usenet, albeit in a much more limited role.
You see, the Usenet's golden age was in pre-web days, as well as during the rise
of the world-wide web on the Internet. Imminent Death of the Usenet was
predicted when AOL connected its customers to Usenet, lowering the barrier
to entry for participating in the discussions (and flamewars) therein. But
other dens of literate ladies and gentlemen, such as The Well, already
offered access to the Usenet... including many forward-looking newspaper
reporters.
What were the nature of these discussions? If we ignore the constant
flamewars, a lot of these discussions were "news" (in the old sense of the
word) in particular niches, divided by subject matter into "newsgroups".
But most importantly to this discussion: newsgroup traffic included
discussion of mainstream media articles, _in forums not under control of the
original publisher_. These were not only easier to participate in than
"Letters to the Editor", but it was a many-to-many discussion, where pretty
much anybody who wanted to could contribute their ideas.
This was the dawn of the loosely-organized group we now call "Netroots."
Today, such discussions have largely moved to web forums. And there are a
lot of folks working for newspapers that still don't get this: because, if
you observe what they are up to, a lot of it has to do with setting up their
own web pages, their own forums...and pretending that they still have a
monopoly on "news".
There's an old saw that goes, "the Net interprets censorship as damage, and
routes around it." This was handily illustrated recently, when #CNNFail and
#MSMFail were a trending topics on Twitter -- Iran had just had an
election with a controversial outcome, and the mainstream media ignored it,
at least until the outcry on Twitter made it impossible for U.S mainstream
media to ignore the event.
Meanwhile, there's a kind of mini-culture war going on in newsrooms (and
with them) of any newspapers that are still alive in the U.S. market: for
more on this, I recommend reading Ms. Chen's blog at
http://savethemedia.com . But in quick summary, those newsrooms that clamor
loudest about "responsible journalism" are those that would prefer to keep
their own monopoly on news, acting as arbiters of what is vouchsafed worthy
of the American public.
I'll conclude with the same observation I made a couple of weeks ago, in my
FB article "R.I.P. Legacy Media": the question today isn't whether or not
We the People will be welcomed into the "discussion" controlled by these
legacy newsapapers -- but whether or not these doomed entities will be
allowed into the conversation being had by We the People.
That's still my story, and I'm sticking with it.
No, I'm not talking about the constant media circus on 24-hour "news"
channels -- we already know that they aren't sustainable in the face of
actual many-to-many communications on the Net. Nor is it about the
"troll-for-$$" business model of "talk" radio, as well as less savory web
sites.
No, I'm talking about the traditional outlet for "respectable news" -- newspapers.
I don't know if you've noticed, but newspapers aren't doing so well
nowadays. From where I'm sitting, it looks to me that there are a couple of
reasons for this:
1) Newspapers in these United States have shackled themselves to a
for-profit motive. Because indeed, the very bottom line with newspapers is
to maximize ROI.
2) Newspapers are run, and largely staffed, by people who grew up in a
United States where they were the arbiters of what constituted "news" -- a model that has been eroding for over 18 years.
Eighteen (18) years ago, I was lucky enough to end up working at a community
college, one of three in California to be connected to the Internet. I
started with access to an HP Unix system, running a vital command-line tool
called "rn". Short for "(r)ead (n)ews", this was my client to connect to the Usenet,
which remains the world's largest distributed "bulletin board
system". Today, people have relatively easy access to much of the Usenet (but
not all of it) through "Google Groups". And I daresay that many savvy
Internet old-timers still use the Usenet, albeit in a much more limited role.
You see, the Usenet's golden age was in pre-web days, as well as during the rise
of the world-wide web on the Internet. Imminent Death of the Usenet was
predicted when AOL connected its customers to Usenet, lowering the barrier
to entry for participating in the discussions (and flamewars) therein. But
other dens of literate ladies and gentlemen, such as The Well, already
offered access to the Usenet... including many forward-looking newspaper
reporters.
What were the nature of these discussions? If we ignore the constant
flamewars, a lot of these discussions were "news" (in the old sense of the
word) in particular niches, divided by subject matter into "newsgroups".
But most importantly to this discussion: newsgroup traffic included
discussion of mainstream media articles, _in forums not under control of the
original publisher_. These were not only easier to participate in than
"Letters to the Editor", but it was a many-to-many discussion, where pretty
much anybody who wanted to could contribute their ideas.
This was the dawn of the loosely-organized group we now call "Netroots."
Today, such discussions have largely moved to web forums. And there are a
lot of folks working for newspapers that still don't get this: because, if
you observe what they are up to, a lot of it has to do with setting up their
own web pages, their own forums...and pretending that they still have a
monopoly on "news".
There's an old saw that goes, "the Net interprets censorship as damage, and
routes around it." This was handily illustrated recently, when #CNNFail and
#MSMFail were a trending topics on Twitter -- Iran had just had an
election with a controversial outcome, and the mainstream media ignored it,
at least until the outcry on Twitter made it impossible for U.S mainstream
media to ignore the event.
Meanwhile, there's a kind of mini-culture war going on in newsrooms (and
with them) of any newspapers that are still alive in the U.S. market: for
more on this, I recommend reading Ms. Chen's blog at
http://savethemedia.com . But in quick summary, those newsrooms that clamor
loudest about "responsible journalism" are those that would prefer to keep
their own monopoly on news, acting as arbiters of what is vouchsafed worthy
of the American public.
I'll conclude with the same observation I made a couple of weeks ago, in my
FB article "R.I.P. Legacy Media": the question today isn't whether or not
We the People will be welcomed into the "discussion" controlled by these
legacy newsapapers -- but whether or not these doomed entities will be
allowed into the conversation being had by We the People.
That's still my story, and I'm sticking with it.
Advertisement
I think that the printed press will migrate in the direction that the information technology press has already gone. The rise and fall of printed computer magazines is instructive.
Prior to about '80, there was very little in the way of computer magazines. ComputerWorld and Datamation come to mind as trade magazines. During the '80s we saw magazines like Byte, PC Magazine, PC World, Computer Shopper, and others started up. During the '90s, they grew to telephone book sized proportions and took over a substantial section of bookstore news stands.
Byte and Datamation are long gone. Dr. Dobbs died recently. PC Mag, and PC World are very thin shadows of their former selves. ComputerWorld, once a fat weekly tabloid is now a thin weekly magazine. A whole variety of trade magazines have either died or become very slender in their print editions.
Most still exist, even the ones that no longer ship print. They send out periodic emails to their subsribers and provide the editorial content on web sites. Many web sites publish reader comments or have blog sections. These are a mixed success. Unmoderated commentary tends to resemble the conversations in a neighborhood bar after midnight. The moderated sites or more obscure specilized sites do have good comments and conversations.
I would expect most media will go in the same direction - a combination of some push technology to gain their subscribers' attention, coupled with an easy access to their editorial content.
September 13, 2009 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink