where old newspapers go to die
On Twitter I follow a feed called THEMEDIAISDYING (http://twitter.com/themediaisdying). It posts numerous updates throughout the day about changes in newspapers, television and magazines. Not surprisingly, given the name, most of those changes are negative. There have been a lot of layoffs lately. Since I used to work for a newspaper and still have friends who do, I take a morbid interest in what is happening to the industry.
The picture ain’t pretty and I don’t believe the current recession is the whole reason. It’s just the last straw on the camel’s poor old back. When I was still at the paper, the signs of decrepitude were rampant. It was obvious for years that upper management regarded the internet with suspicion, at best. At less than the best, they showed outright hostility, even while they publicly claimed to be pleased at having new opportunities to serve the community and blah blah blah. In the editorial area blogs are still regarded with suspicion, if not contempt, even when papers start their own sites that they call blogs.
That’s always funny. Seen the Wall Street Journal’s new tech blog? It’s at http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/. I have no idea why they refer to this slick, overstaffed exercise as a blog. It looks to me like ordinary empty-headed pseudo tech reporting of the kind you get from professional reporters who are considered experts in tech because they actually know who to call to find out the difference between a bit and a byte, or they may have actually interviewed an important tech guy like Steve Ballmer at some point in time.
Maybe I’m being too hard on them. That’s always possible. But it doesn’t alter the fact that WSJ analyzed the blog concept, decided it would be worth investing their brand and significant resources into, and came up with just another newspaper type section.
I’m probably going to delete the RSS feed before long. It’s boring.
In part, the problem is ordinary big corporate, play-it-safe, kind of boringness. Corporations don’t trust anyone or anything with too much personality. Blogs, otoh, thrive on personality. The newspapers and other big media of this country are extremely corporate these days. There’s also the problem of lifelong professional journalists who want to cover mainstream stuff in a professional way. Even if it fails, it’s good for the resume, right?
Yawn.
One of the few writers whose work I truly admire is a hilarious and brilliant Canadian named Mark Steyn (http://www.steynonline.com). Mr. Steyn was educated in England (I believe) and has traveled the world. His take on current media problems is that American newspapers are the English-speaking world’s most boring. I think one of the reasons they give this impression is because the media are all pretty much the same. They report the same stories from the same perspective. They even seem to make the same mistakes.
If that perspective is correct, then the death of one or two newspapers, magazines or even TV news shows, doesn’t matter to the consumers. They will just go to a different venue to get exactly the same information. With the Internet, they don’t even have to pay for it. Why should they if the exact same thing is available somewhere else for free? The same thing applies to advertisers. Why pay the local paper’s exhorbitant rates if there’s no particular reason for anyone to buy the paper?
That’s why the media is dying (am dying?), I think. The Internet is a fabulous opportunity for media who can find a way to differentiate themselves. So far, though, they haven’t even tried. Maybe I’m wrong. I’d like to be because, if I’m not, I know a number of good, hard working people who are going to be unemployed probably within the next year or two.
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