Letters from NYC

A Prescription for Big Media’s Salvation?

In the Spring ’05 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, an international opinion magazine published by Princeton University’s Center for Int’l Relations & Diplomatic Scholars, William Powers writes a lengthy article on the 7 Steps to Big Media’s Salvation (free). I summarize his views here for your consideration, and then take issue with his viewpoint.

1. Relax. Nobody likes a whiner, particularly one who doesn’t know how lucky he is. You’ve been around for centuries, and you’re more powerful now than ever before.

2. Enjoy yourselves. …traditional news outlets have become joyless things. Most American [broadcasts and] newspapers are dull, fearful creatures. In contrast, blogs and other online news sources often possess an attractive, intelligent vibrancy… because it connects us to the great throng of humanity.

3. Be natural. Enough already with your pretensions to objectivity and neutrality. Everyone has leanings, passions, and, yes, biases. By claiming to be superhuman—bias free—you come off as weirdly subhuman. In all honesty, sometimes you have the public personality of an android. Striving for perfect fairness is a fine goal. Just don’t act as though you achieve it on a regular basis.

4. Don’t patronize. One reason young people say they avoid newspapers and other traditional news media is that what’s offered by those outlets has no apparent connection to the world they live in. To them, the news doesn’t look or sound like life but rather like some false approximation of it. Swear off demographics. Hire journalists of all ages, and deploy them in unexpected ways. In journalism, there’s no such thing as generationally correct work. Have an octogenarian cover blogs. When David Broder retires from The Washington Post, give his column to the sharpest 27-year-old you know. The results could be strange and wonderful.

5. Make trouble. It’s a fact: Nobody respects a suck-up. Why did it take the surprise attack of 9/11, and a war launched partly on the basis of bad intelligence, for you to wake up to the problems in the U.S. intelligence agencies? That story was an investigative journalist’s dream, and you missed it. You were probably in a strategy meeting about how to regain all those eyeballs no longer trained on you.

6. Only disconnect. There’s a widespread sense in the news business that contemporary audiences want their news delivered strictly in quick hits…The baby boomers are about to start retiring, and they’re going to have a lot of time on their hands. Tiny news bites won’t fill the hours or satisfy their need. [Can] you old-media types wait for someone else to make this happen—bloggers?

7. Don’t give up hope. When television started to take off after World War II, radio seemed doomed, and nearsighted futurists confidently wrote the medium’s obituary. There’s a chance that you traditional media will get another shot at this supposedly lost generation of news consumers. If you play your cards right, you might even turn “serious” newspapers and news broadcasts into badges of maturity and arrival. …Defy the mavens of media marketing. Live dangerously. Be bright and sophisticated. And people may surprise you.

My first issue with Powers, a former Washington Post journalist and current National Journal writer, is that his prescription come a little too late, as the messengers of Old Media have already “jumped the shark”. Old Media and their talking heads and personalities, have been relegated (as their own declining revenues proves) in ever increasing numbers to the role of supplementary source of news for a growing majority of news followers that then turn to the web for substance and cross-referencing information.

The main cause of this deminse is not the medium or the style but Trust. The sensationalist rather than detail rich content of news stories during the presidential campaign, and later the Abu Graib and Newsweek/Koran toilet stories. simply ushered your demise as a primary source of questionably reliable information. Your ever increasing retractions and apologies do little to resuscitate your status quo or ingratiate you to the masses.

Sorry Mr. Powers, but you and Old Media are so deeply entrenched in a format and with relationships (such as advertisers, pollsters, media rating companies, image and rating consultants), that all of you have become impervious to the moribund state you find yourselves in. Your inability to change, let alone recognize the sign posts of your diseased and fevered state, have been everywhere this past year, your reluctance in making substantial changes have made the inherent obvious now a certainty.

In not heeding McLuhan or blogoshpere’s warnings, all of you Old Media Types have successfully enshrined your fate and sealed your demise. Ample proof of this can be found not only in the consistently declining circulation of every major newspaper, but also in David Sifry’s report (for Technorati): State of the Blogsophere. It is here that the we see the masses actively creating a community of explorers searching the horizons for truth, where “a new blog is created about every second,” with about “80,000 [blogs] created daily.” This brings the total of active blogs to 14.2 million, a hefty number of truth seekers if you ask me.

Mr. Powers, just as the masses rescued the bible from it’s high priests, these same knowing masses have seized the web as purveyors of knowledge and availed themselves of blogs as their scribes and agitators for truth.

Here's a newsflash, which I'm sharing with Outside the Beltway readers: Old Media is dead; consider this post your formal obituary. Blogs are here and have taken their place!

Posted by Michele at August 3, 2005 03:17 PM | TrackBack