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Between crisis, panic… and opportunity

9 comments on Between crisis, panic… and opportunity

Between crisis, panic… and opportunity

: The Guardian stitches together a bunch of quotes about American media in crisis:

“It’s somewhere between crisis and a panic,” says Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, New York. “The generation that lived through Woodward and Bernstein and Vietnam has almost gone. They had an idea that they could make a difference and that they were a force. It might have been pompous but it was there.” …

“There is a perception that the media has failed,” says Michael Wolff, a media commentator and Vanity Fair columnist. “There is a general understanding that something has gone radically wrong here.” It is a feeling coming from both outside the industry and from within. Gitlin was recently invited to a meeting at the Times to discuss how to combat the erosion of confidence and stagnant sales. “There was a real sense of urgency,” he says. “They were asking some fundamental questions. It was not a casual exercise.”

I think we’re moving onto the next phase, having gone through the stages of denial, resistance, and panic.

Whether at those darned conferences or in conversations with people I know, I now see big media looking — some eagerly, some desperately — for ways to embrace the new ways. It’s more than a blogs-are-hot fad moment. I’m starting to see a realization that this is about a new relationship with the public, new ways to gather news and information, new ways to involve diverse viewpoints, and — at long last — new business models.

9 responses to “Between crisis, panic… and opportunity”

  1. henrycopeland Avatar
    henrycopeland

    To complete your paragraph: it is about 19th century high-overhead businesses with cost-structures premised on now-disappearing monopolies up against zero-overhead competition born and bred on the internet, the ultimate economies-of-scale-machine.

  2. Danny Taggart Avatar
    Danny Taggart

    Keep dreaming. These wackjobs would rather die a slow death for their utopian causes, than adapt.

  3. JennyD Avatar
    JennyD

    Oh my. Babyboomers (now nearly geezers) have discovered that their ideas didn’t prove to be the ultimate answer to everything. Yawn.
    These guys sound like the near-geezers they are. They sound like the same people that boomers used to criticize when boomers were young and wore big sideburns.
    (BTW, geezer is a state of mind, characterized by an unattractive clinging to old ideas and an inability to grasp new ones.)

  4. paul_lukasiak Avatar
    paul_lukasiak

    The real issue concerning journalism is the question of how one remains a credible messenger when the message they feel obligated to convey is a pack of lies.
    The credibility of the media is not impacted by charges of “bias” — people are quite capable of, and used to, filtering facts from spin. In a post-modern environment, in which every news item is surrounded by the commercial propaganda called advertising, people automatically compensate for “spin”.
    Nor is the credibility of the media significantly impacted by the fabrications of a Jayson Blair, the bought-and-paid-for opinions of Armstrong Williams, or the mistakes of CBS news in authenticating documents. None of these problems rise to the level where they actually impact the American people’s lives. The American people know that nobody’s perfect, that people make mistakes, and that things fall through the cracks sometimes because there will always be cracks for things to fall through.
    It is when the media becomes the conduit for dissemination of government lies and disinformation on issues of vital importance to people that the media’s credibility is impacted. Since Vietnam and Watergate, people have distrusted politicians, and relied upon the media to keep them honest. We aren’t supposed to go to war on false pretenses — and we expect the media to keep that from happening — and when we realize that we can no longer rely on the media to separate lies, disinformation, and propaganda from the truth, we stop trusting the media.
    The all-out assault on the truth by the Bush regime — the lies about WMDs and an Iraq- al Qaeda connection, the rejection of established science and the substitution of pseudo-science, the creation of a phony “crisis” in Social Security and the presentation of a “plan” that will exacerbate long term problems as one which will “save” Social Security {and the list is endless)— have shown that the media is incapable of separating truth from lies, and holding government liars accountable.
    The Bush regime found the fatal weakness of the mainstream media — its assumption that although politician will spin the facts, they will not flat out lie on matters of National Security and other issues of vital importance to the American people. The media has conveyed the Bush regime lies as if those lies were merely spun truths, and not complete misrepresentations of the facts. And when the media reports the fact that the American people have been lied to, it is the media’s reputation that suffers the most.

  5. Daniel Conover Avatar
    Daniel Conover

    One thing worth remembering as we watch the MSM dinosaurs lurch into the 21st century: There’s a lot of valuable information infrastructure bound-up in those late 20th-century newsrooms.
    Give that infrastructure (reporters, editors, computers, librarians, technicians, travel budgets, subscriptions, etc.) a better business and communications model and there’s at least a CHANCE that something very good could come of all this.
    To me, that’s what all this is about: Not killing the MSM, but freeing the MSM.

  6. David Foster Avatar
    David Foster

    In general, “new business models” means “new businesses.” Although existing institutions are sometimes able to adapt to new models, it takes exceptional leadership for them to do so. I doubt that there is much leadership of this level in the media business.

  7. Patricia Avatar
    Patricia

    “They were asking some fundamental questions. It was not a casual exercise.”
    Whew! I’m all het up!

  8. Sandy P Avatar
    Sandy P

    Jenny, it IS all about them, after all.

  9. neo-neocon Avatar
    neo-neocon

    The generation who lived through Vietnam and Watergate are almost gone? I hadn’t noticed. A few high-profile ones, certainly, but anyone over fifty would certainly have been around and conscious for those events.
    And I sincerely hope that those fundamental questions they were asking weren’t limited to variations on these themes: “How can we position ourselves to get a better market share?” and “How can we get people to perceive that we’re doing a better job?”
    I hope the question really was “How can we actually do a better job of getting unbiased information out to the public and labeling it as information, and getting opinion out to the public and labeling it as opinion?”