Will New Media Beget New "Old" Media?
Here's an interesting conclusion to an interesting Reason article by Matt Welch (that you should read in its entirety):
Having nonpartisan, elite news organizations staffed overwhelmingly by Democratic-leaning journalists -- a recent study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that newsroom liberals outnumber conservatives by 5 to 1 on the national level, 3 to 1 locally -- creates an obvious demand for right-leaning news in the growing number of markets that enjoy competition.
During July’s Democratic National Convention, for example, the Boston Herald sought to differentiate itself from the more staid Globe by bashing the bejesus out John Kerry’s entire family. ("Kerry Girls Gone Wild," was one headline.) "If The Boston Globe hates Kerry," one Herald reporter told me, "then the Herald wants to kill his wife and decapitate his children." As Herald Editor Ken Chandler explained to The New Yorker, "Somebody’s got to be the conservative paper in this town."
But newspaper liberals are significantly to the right of political lefties on issues such as free trade and military interventionism, so yet another thriving cottage industry has emerged from the ideological gap, as evidenced by the phenomenon of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and the myriad pocket-sized bestsellers by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal. Now that it’s no longer prohibitively expensive to print a book or even launch a daily newspaper, politically based competition in an evenly and passionately divided Red-Blue nation is inevitable, and it is already shaking up a news industry that had grown fat and boring.
OutFoxed would have you react to this world by petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to "take back our media" (which, judging by its long and gaseous interview with former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, perhaps means a return to 90 minutes a day of broadcast news). But the documentary’s very existence suggests that a hands-off FCC -- one whose relaxation of ownership restrictions allowed Murdoch to create a fourth national network in the first place -- is one that will allow media activists’ treasured goal of "diversity" to actually flourish. Last year in The Atlantic Monthly the media commentator James Fallows predicted "there will be liberal papers, radio shows, TV programs, and Web sites for liberals, and conservative ones for conservatives."
Such an environment may make journalists sweat about the future of their profession. But even the most jaded critic should recognize that fretting about a new newspaper’s motives is a considerable improvement over 40 years of not having any new newspapers to complain about.
Rupert Murdoch has shown that there's a market for a targeted news outlet. I'm not sure if that holds for the newspaper industry (if it did, I'm pretty sure Welch would be a print bigshot for Richard Riordan about now, and it's not clear to me yet that the New York Sun can be deemed a "success").
I do think that existing newspapers are going to have to start being more responsive to their markets, though, or they're going to leave themselves open to startups. Here's Lileks from a few days ago (talking about bloggers and Rather):
Blogs haven’t toppled old media. The foundations of Old Media were rotten already. The new media came along at the right time. Put it this way: you’ve see films of old buildings detonated by precision demolitionists. First you see the puffs of smoke – then the building just hangs there for a second, even though every column that held it up has been severed. We’ve been living in that second for years, waiting for the next frame. Well, here it is. Roll tape. Down she goes. And when the dust settles we will be right back where we were 100 years ago, with dozens of fiercely competitive media outlets throwing elbows to earn your pennies.
In retrospect, TV looks like a big smothering quilt: it killed the afternoon papers, forced the survivors to consolidate; it reshaped the news cycle to fit its needs, shifted the emphasis to the visual. It fed off the Times and the Post and other surviving papers, which had institutionalized the Watergate and Vietnam templates as the means by which we understand events. The old-line media, like its Boomer components, got old, and like the Boomers, it preferred self-congratulation to self-reflection. And so the Internet had it for lunch, because the Internet does not have to schedule 17 meetings to develop a strategy for impactfully maximizing brand leverage in emerging markets; the Internet does not have to worry about how a decision will affect one’s management trajectory; the Internet smells blood and leaps, and that has turned the game around, for better or worse. So we’re back to where we were in 1904 – except that the guys on the corner shouting WUXTRY, WUXTRY aren’t grimy urchins selling the paper – they’re the people who wrote the damn thing, too.
I repeat my earlier obvious advice to middle-market newspapers: go local.
Back to Welch: go local (or else?)
There are at least two new Houston-centric blogs to be appearing soon (and developing, so far as I can tell, in weird parallel universes). There's already Chronically Biased, which occasionally still carries a post related to Houston. And there are plenty of personal blogs that at least touch on Houston. It's all filling a niche (and need?) going unfilled by the print daily and print weekly.
But I don't know if I'd bet on a new print daily anytime soon. I think Welch is a little too optimistic on that front.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/14/04 23:09 | Other | Technorati
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