American media in a crisis?
Is American media in a crisis? Well, it isn't hard to argue that this is indeed the case: journalists that fake information, extort celebrities and make up stories, advertising revenues bleeding and those eternally vigilant bloggers everywhere. It doesn't seem too good. And in a sense the crisis is deeper than is usually realized. It is probably also much more interesting than we think, from a historical perspective.
Judith and Jason and Jaded Transparency
Judith Miller and Jason Blair are often cited as examples of a crisis not in American media, but perhaps more in American journalism. And the still unravelling affair of mr Stern , where a sting operation uncovered a protection scheme for celebrities that is nothing short of bizarre (for $100 000 a local billionaire was ensured immunity from the scandal monger, and there were even different packages: if the celebrity so chose he could feed Stern with gossip on other celebrities instead to insure his own immunity to the prying of the press) is really not something that inspires trust in an already somewhat tarnished craft.
But is this all bad? Anne Gordon, managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, thinks that it may well be the start of a rebirth of the classical values of journalism. The press is now developing new practices of transparency and correction that are designed to meet the requirements even of those pesky bloggers. Gordon rightly points out that the press is reacting to the criticism being levelled at it. This happens very rarely if at all in other cases: the government, businesses and other societal actors seem content to continue as before after a few obligatory mea culpas in press releases and perhaps an emotional TV-interview.
What does not kill me, makes me stronger, Nietzsche would note. This is a true point, but how is this working out? What is this transparency actually accomplishing? With longer and longer corrections in the news and more vigilance on the behalf of the blogging public the press is probably loosing more of its credibility and forced to adjust its self-image as underdogs and truthseekers to accomodate this change in the public perception. The result of transparency practices may in fact be a further, in some cases well-deserved, erosion of the confidence in the press.
It gets worse before it gets better.
Future Shock
As if these issues were not enough to deal with, the media landscape is going through it's most tumultous phase of change in at least a hundred years. The basic business and revenue models of the media industry are both exploding and imploding at the same time. Technology is remaking the entire field of publishing.
Ad revenues are axploding into other channels: the Internet, mobile, TV, radio, podcasting and even computer games are emerging as new channels for advertising. Many of them low-cost alternatives that offer supreme cost/contact-ratios and interesting novel branding opportunities. And while the revenues from traditional advertising dissipate into new forms made available by emerging technologies, classical classifieds are being swallowed by new business models like eBay. Sure, some newspapers have succeeded in creating their own alternatives, and they have actually leveraged their local brand value to migrate into the new channels – but they now have to compete in an environment where the lock-in costs for consumers are almost zero. Network economics will help those that started first, and create feedback loops that strengthen those that were first to market, but that in no way offers any long-term guarantee that these models will continue to work.
This explosion of revenues is accompanied by a curious implosion of the basic business model offered by newspapers: selling subscriptions and copies to the public. News has been become a commodity in less than ten years, and only a few niched newsoutlets have succeeded in getting paid for news. In the cases where this succeeds it is often because the news in question has an evident economic worth, so the perhaps most successful actors are of course business magazines like Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.
Young people turn primarily to the web for news and ignore the classical paper version. This is evident in the studies published by, for example, the Pew Internet and American Life project. Dr Brad Horrigan says that this may not be extremely bad – since it only signals a change of medium not a change of the interest in news as such. The problem, however, seems to be that there is no business model for the new medium handy that can carry the cost structures generated by the old medium. Paper-based cost structures are collapse if they have to rely on digital revenues.
Things that go Blog in the night
Add to this those horrible, citizen, grassroot-journalists that everybody talks about, those, those...bloggers. They read the news and they read them with the most critical pair of glasses in circulation since Old Nick perused the Holy Writ. They are said to be bad for almost everything, those bloggers: they polarize the country, they know little of politics and less of analysis...But the problem is that they keep growing. Dr Brad Horrigan at the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows in recent data that 11% of adult internet users blog and a whopping 25% of adult internet users read blogs (yes, there are more readers than writers, contrary to the popular conception of blogs written by and for other bloggers, if for anyone...)
And bloggers seem better informed than the average citizen about what the opposing side actually thinks. This is no guarantee against polarization, mind. As Dr Horrigan points out when we meet, mr Rush Limbaugh probably has a pretty good idea about what the democrats want to do. This does not, however, stop him from being a fairly polarizing force in American society.
Bloggers find scandal and exploit it. They force angry retorts and tear through politicians reputations like a samurai on speed thorugh a rice-paper wall. They create a new public sphere, even. In a recent court case it was found that a person has less reasonable expectation of privacy if he or she has been the object of bloggers' investigations.
In a sense there is only one thing the bloggers remind us of. And that is early American journalists. In his funny and revealing book Infamous Scribblers Eric Burns shows these early journalists and some of the earliest American papers to be little more than scandal peddling, controversial and divisive outlets of partisan anger and hate. The aim for the jugular in American media was born early, and the bloggers merely adhere to an old tradition when they seek sordid rumours and exploit them.
James Callendar, for example, publisher of the rumours about Alexander Hamiltons affair with Marya Reynolds secured for himself many advantages by extorting Jefferson. Even the now-notorius Stern is merely walking in the footsteps of his predcessors in the American media.
If anything the bloggers have a connection with the original American press. The unbearably politically correct newspapers have ossified into giants without heart and spite – much to their own detriment, it seems.
”Infamous Scribblers” is actually a quote from Washington, but it fits very nicely as a description of the bloggers. And remember, then, that from the infamous scribblers were born one of the world's perhaps most impressive newsindustries.
Creative destruction, rebirth and re-innovation. Those are really not signs of weakness.
What's next?
So – where is American media headed? Is it in a crisis? Not at all. American media is reinventing itself bottom up. Newspapers are being sold, much as Anne Gordons Philadelphia Inquirer, and the sector is undoubtely being consolidated. But there is something else, interesting, happening at the same time.
The large telecommunication and cable companies are developing vertically, ensuring that they can provide interesting content to their users. Some buy baseball teams, others do movies, betting that video is the next big competetive advantage. But it is not unreasonable to hope that news and analysis as well as commentary may become important new elements in the offering of these vertically integrated communication giants.
Sure, in economic theory this would never happen. Andrew Odlyzko was quite right when he stated that content is not king. In a competitive situation telecommunications would try to differentiate their business models by becoming better at their core business. True, there might be some interesting opportunities for horizontal or vertical integration, but it is doubtful if this would hold for the deals now being crafted in the situation rooms at Comcast, Verizon and other similiar companies. Those deals make sense only in a situation where competition is limited, and where consolidation and vertical integration then become attractive alternatives.
And it is important to debunk one of the myths about the current crisis in the media: people do want qualified content. They seek analysis and commentary as well as in-depth articles. I listened to Steven Weisman of the New York Times at a seminar recently and he told the attending crowd that he had actually checked the statistics at the New York Times: the analytical content, the commentary and background articles were among the most popular articles that the newspapers website offer to it's readers. So the demand for good journalism is as strong as ever, perhaps stronger. It combines with a demand for scandal, that has been fairly constant during the lifetime of the American press, but this is nothing new, nothing to be alarmed by.
The future hinges on the newsindustry re-inventing itself, or being re-invented by another industry. Look at the music industry. In it's current sclerotic mode it would have sued the next generation of customers to death if Apple had not come along and saved them.
It all boils down to this: who will be the iTunes of the American newsmedia?