Here's an interesting article on the position of the media in an internet-saturated society . (Hat tip, Peter Koht.) Its basic point is that the media no longer contains stories within its own sphere, but is a part of the information stream that occupies each individual's sphere. It also posits that the printing of a story is just one part of the story's lifespan, and no longer the final stage with the ability to link, comment, and propagate without media's so-called blessing.

Once again, I find the role of the internet to be greatly exaggerated in terms of its transformative value. I'm not sure the internet transformed anything, just exploded it. The first diagram of the world being filtered exclusively through the media before being digested by people is overly simplistic. For one, people don't have direct access to the world now without 'media' -- the internet is a medium, and if much of its content is generated by non-professionals, that doesn't change the fact that it's administered by large corporations and the government, and paid for by end users. Nobody argues that radio is not a medium, and that radio stations are part of this media sphere. The internet is sort of like radio, just with a much, much higher proportion of shortwave hobbyist broadcasters.

Secondly, stories have always lived on beyond their printing or broadcasting -- comments and links are just public and technological versions of backfence gossip and dinner conversation. When was the last time you saw a story's content genuinely advanced by the comments section? It happens, but the main purpose of that function is to append the public's editorial feelings about the topic to the actual source of information. Whereas before, reporters never really knew what people were saying about their story, now it's right there under the column, in all its splendor.

Thirdly, the struggle for traditional media organizations is not, as so many people have asserted, finding a way to corral "citizen journalism" and other brands of user-generated content. The whole point of user-generated content is that users just go ahead and generate it, without media's old-ass organization stepping in to facilitate. It turns out, media organizations still have a tremendous spotlight to shine on stories, and still, in a way, 'create' stories by using that spotlight. The dissemination that happens afterward doesn't fundamentally alter this role. What it alters is the ability to make money on this role.

And there's the rub. All this hand-wringing about a changing media landscape is really just a financial panic because internet revenues are not as money-grown-on-trees easy to come by as paper and broadcast revenues. I bet they will be, though, someday soon. In the meantime, any organization that makes enormous and expensive changes to its newsgathering room (unless those changes are geared toward efficiency) is missing the point. People aren't looking for a new kind of news. Almost every link to every story you see on the internet and Google comes from 'old' kinds of news. People are just spreading that news in a way that circumvents traditional modes of revenue. This is a business crisis much more than an editorial one. 

Bookmark

E-mail This

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Write comment

Name

E-mail

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via e-mail (Registered users only)

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment