He takes the stage clad in a black turtleneck. his famous line is, “Green is the new red, white, and blue.” Tonight, and other nights, he is paid tens of thousands of dollars to perform. He spent a year touring America, adding China for good measure. When he returns home, he lands in an 11,400-square-foot house.
He’s not a rock star, although his life resembles that of one. He is Thomas Friedman, author, newspaperman, star commenter. His ascent is part and parcel of a period in which newspapers may train even their lowliest reporters for media appearances. Journalists these days grin under pancake make-up, speak in emphatic and punchy sentences, and videotape themselves for YouTube. In short, they sometimes succeed when they tear a page from performers’ scripts.
It got me thinking: Could one ailing media industry—music—teach another ailing media industry—journalism—a thing or two about survival?
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Some valuable points, but American journalism has never held as significant a market share as the music industry. There's just no comparison between the demand between the music industry and the media industry. And that makes any further argument stilted.
American journalists for decades have shared the same challenges as American automakers -- they've been producing products no one wants. Of course, there are small markets and we should have both industries domestically, but there's no point in selling ads for cars if American cars have no demand, selling TV ads for newspapers if newspapers have no demand, or marketing journalists if journalism has no demand.
In Japan, yes -- compare the the media and music by all means. For the US, though, I'd be baffled the day when Americans stole journalism articles.
Posted by David Taube on Tue 16 Dec 2008 at 06:13 PM
Your subtitle is apt: "What journalists could learn..." decidedly not "What journalism could learn."
That is to say, the models you describe may be a boon to Thomas Friedman or Andrew Rivkin, or those who wish to emulate them. But what do they have to offer the institution of journalism, which we are told is endangered?
I speak as a consumer, not a producer, of journalism. For me, the success of any individual journalist in producing opinion or criticism matters not a whit.
Can the music industry offer a model for financing, say, a Baghdad bureau or a science desk if the standard subscription model becomes unsustainable?
Posted by Chad Nilep on Wed 17 Dec 2008 at 08:26 AM
We haven't had a "musical monoculture" in this country for more than 20 years. Moreover, Merge is hardly a new label; it's been cultivating its niche audience since 1989 The glimpse of Friedman on tour isn't particularly illuminating. Authors and intellectual personalities have been making paid appearances here in the U.S. for a couple hundred years. This sort of promotion hasn't changed. What's changed is that news outlets want a piece of the action. In any case, the leveling effect of the Web and other Internet resources is something quite different.
Posted by Ed on Wed 17 Dec 2008 at 01:35 PM
Readers now care deeply about the biographies of the people who produce their news, writing or talking or what-have-you. But why? And how to convince journalists who want so badly to get it?
I think the answer lies in trust. It is the general concept and can explain why the "Unbiased Media ideal" worked in the departing era and why the "premodern storytelling mode" will work the arriving one.
It is largely the story of Too Much Information, which is itself a chapter of the digital democratization of the printing press and a chapter of essentially free access to the internet. It is now orders of magnitude easier to produce and to consume the news, in other words. Interaction is cheap, even nearly free, between perfect strangers continents apart, and fast. More and more, trust just happens differently.
This explanation is nothing new. Prominent writers have been talking about these inside-out, upside-down profound shifts in media since many students at the j-school were in the fifth grade:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/08/the-newspaper-indust.html
So what does "cheap interaction" promise? Instead of rewriting what others have already said (because links are free and clicks are convenient), let me point the way to Umair Haque on the erosion of brands:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/02/the_shrinking_advantage_of_bra_1.html
Extra credit to the brave journalist who groks the flipping of attention from relatively abundant to relatively scarce (see the ppt):
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:oMAXEhvljFoJ:www.bubblegeneration.com/resources/mediaeconomics.ppt+umair+haque+ppt
This isn't a tweak to the old system. This doesn't call for a Friday meeting to develop a new strategy. This isn't a demand for a pretty new website or flashy widget. This simply a new business, a new industry, a new world; this is a return to first principles of old.
So what is the news? It's producers, who write or share the news, and consumers, who read the news. They are be largely the same people; they must trust one another. The news requires sources. The news is stories about people and organizations, about topics or beats, and about events. The news is opinion, and the news is fact. The news is new--sometimes so new nowadays that it can happen in real- or near-real time and can thus morph into a conversation.
So, yes, write about journalists' ripping a page from musicians' script, if you like. But mightn't it be more worthwhile to write our own, pieced together from basic facts and laws like these?
I bet it would be fun.
Posted by Josh Young on Wed 17 Dec 2008 at 02:54 PM
In response to Mr. Taube's comment, it isn't necessarily true that no one wants journalism. People want and need information. I am a sophomore communications major, and what I find increasingly--among my age bracket at least--is that people don't trust large news companies. There's this mentality of "can't believe everything you read" that makes young people, especially, more skeptical and cynical about the credibility of newspapers, from their local news to the New York Times.
These same young people, however, are more likely to trust individuals as news sources, especially if those individuals have built a repertoire of trust with their readers. The downside is, obviously, that many of these "news sources" are not trained in the methods or ethics of journalism, but are freelancing citizen journalists.
The alternative to drawing niche audiences to trained, professional journalists as people and not just as bylines is to watch journalism as an institution perish. It's a mass-media culture business in an increasingly individual-centric culture world. If professional journalists don't adapt, those who want and need news--and that's everybody--will have nowhere to go but to untrained freelancers.
Posted by April Gunn on Thu 26 Mar 2009 at 10:27 AM