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The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism
The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some more. Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that) explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column translates and deconstructs Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's Michael Gerson became the latest journo to bemoan the death of journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gerson's claim that (all?) bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print journalists.
The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism
In Schmidt's piece, he used the word 'journalism' once:
I believe it also requires a change of tone in the debate, a recognition that we all have to work together to fulfill the promise of journalism in the digital age.
Don't ever kid yourself that journalism will die. It's certainly changing but the thing that might die is the old model of power structures and funding around journalism. Journalists will still do reporting and writing for a monetary sum. The channels where that money comes from are rapidly changing ('rapidly' is relative to how historically slow change has been in this world). This friction is creating the death throes of (most) companies involved as money makers in the traditional channels.
It's change, it's probably for the better (as Schmidt notes) but one thing's for sure: it's unavoidable. Adapt or die.
One more thing:
Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that)
Never forget that Murdoch still sells eyeballs--at all costs. If it meant betraying a political party or betraying his core values or even displaying another side of the debate, he's here for one thing: money. What we see in the op-ed piece is actually one of the few positive effects of Murdoch's greed. I offer him my rare applause if he had anything to do with this being printed in the WSJ although I'm certain the WSJ printed it to generate revenue and he merely approved of it.
My work here is dung.
The problem is that the FCC gutted the requirement that broadcast networks run their news divisions as a community service, even if this was at a loss. Once network news divisions became profit centers rather than pro-bono losses, they were financially required to present as news that which people wanted to see, not what is actually true. (i.e., corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit - they can't run their news division at a loss without the risk of shareholder lawsuit).
It is sad that what most people want to watch as "news" is not actually true, but there is and always has been a corrective to this: require that that which is labelled "news" actually be fact checked and balanced, and require networks to provide such real news as one of the requirements for holding a broadcast license.
Return news divisions to their former status - i.e., one of the community service requirements for the granting of a broadcast license - and we will return to the days of responsible, fact-checked, balanced journalism.
I watch U.S. public television myself, and I like a lot of the programming, but I would still support eliminating it because I don't think it's a good use of public money.
Do you realize you are talking about .013% of the federal budget? This means that if you paid $10,000 in federal taxes last year, that $1.30 went to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That's $400 million in total federal tax funding vs. 5.6 billion that the UK government gives to the BBC.