Old media minds, new media disruption
J.D. Lasica points to this report that CNN has shut down the blog run by one of its Iraq correspondents, Kevin Sites.
I keep seeing the worst in journalism displayed during this war. I've also seen many examples of big media -- and new and old -- refusing to think and act differently up close and personal. There is an explicit assumption by the people running Web sites that reporters and reports should be the same as they've always been. They will talk about the desire to change, but get to the point where actual change is required and they back away fast.
Time for new media-making companies. That's what's next. Having swallowed most of the Web, the old media companies are sitting back and thinking they've got it tamed. It's the perfect time to start screwing with media reality, again, the way Pulitzer, Hearst, Sarnoff and Paley did before. Doing this does not mean just embracing new ways of reporting the news, but also marketing the hell out of the product you create.
Is Tony Perkins doing something important with AlwaysOn, asks Joi Ito? The answer is he is packaging it effectively and that is significant. That doesn't mean he is taking blogging to the next level as much as doing the work any publisher would when shaping a new publication (which is just a different arrangement of the same letters and design notions on a page). We need to avoid confusing the tools with the thing created using the tools. Tony's not making that mistake, which is why people are talking about AlwaysOn. Is it a great source of information? Not yet, maybe never; we'll see.
If doing something radically new requires a form of corporate governance that supports teams of journalists (in the broadest possible sense, including bloggers and participants in events) who never meet face-to-face or have ideas that can co-exist peacefully, then we need to develop that. Or just go ahead and do it the old-fashioned way by paying a few folks upfront to edit what a lot of "freelancers" submit for publication -- again, I use the word "publication" in the broadest possible sense. Just be sure that what you produce is different in a fundamental way (What is that way? You have to pay me for that -- putting food on the table is what motivates, I've always found).
Let's face it, though, there are so many good journalists on the beach right now that the right would-be media mogul can make something happen. Want to be Ted Turner circa 1996 in 10 years? Put up the money for a really radical experiment in news-telling, framing the common dialog and instigating thought in the heads of the audience.
Let's take CNN as an example, because it sucks (scroll down to "The Sound You Just Heard Was Edward R. Murrow Rolling Over In His Grave" -- also see the letters in response to the piece here):
For weeks now I have been trying to figure out how is it that CNN is no longer the number one cable news network since they invented the genre, and then I watched Aaron Brown last night and it became all too clear. Just where did they find this smug talking head? [The answer is: He got his start in the Northwest, where many anchors come from because there was an idea for a while that we don't have a noticeable accent up here. Aaron falls right at the historic end of that memetic pipeline.]
Could CNN stop talking about reporting the news with new technology and actually show us something we've never seen before about war? No. Instead it's hours of pixellated video with Aaron Brown cooing like an idiot: "We talk about covering a war in real-time, but now we're actually doing it." Not informative or entertaining and mostly confusing and a disservice to viewers, because it gives the impression that since not many people seem to be dying on camera war is clean and easy.
In fairness to CNN's having made the mistake of falling prey to the service of its country's morale, rememember that Murrow ended his news career to join the Kennedy administration. What he did do during his time as a reporter and producer is tell the truth to the best of his ability and defined television news for a generation of news people (now long passed). All media and all media people are confronted with the question of how and when to serve their country best. Yet those questions should be coming up every day, not once a decade. CNN is tired and worn out (and warred out) because it isn't doing anything new with the images and variety of sources of information available.
Time for new news companies. Now.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at March 21, 2003 06:53 PM | TrackBack