From Catherine Seipp’s coverage of the nonevent of TV critics’ junkets:
A little later I ran into Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research and media development, and asked what he thought of this kind of old-media attitude. Wurtzel always has something interesting to say, and I was struck by something he’d noted at the NBC press conference earlier that day: “For you guys, it’s not as though they don’t want what you do, but they’re going to consume it in a different way. The news business isn’t trending down; it’s the paper business that’s trending down.”
“Never fight with the consumer,” Wurtzel told me, about these MSM types who seem so sure of kind of news the public ought to want, “you’ll always lose.” He added: “Boy, there are two businesses I wouldn’t put money into right now — newspapers and TV stations. There’s just too many other ways to get news.”