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.

Comments

hard-working, honest, ethical print journalists

[dkleinsc]

Who exactly are they referring to?

- Political journalists, who help their sources insult people and ruin careers anonymously? Or do what Stephen Colbert pointed out was "the White House tells you what to write, you write it down, and print it."
- Sports journalists, who basically are professional sports fans, desperately clinging to rumor, conjecture, and hearsay?
- Business journalists, who often act as cheerleaders for a company's stock more than anything else?
- Slashdot editors? (enough said)

These are not the days of Bernstein, Woodward, Hersch, etc.

the newspapers screwed up their business model

[alen]

for years the model was to sell the newspaper for the cost of print and let advertising cover everything else including the profits. in the late 1990's the newspapers should have bought up Ebay and Craigslist or at the very least started a competitor. instead the trust fund babies who run most of the newspapers allowed their content to be commoditized by Google, they lost the advertising market probably because they thought it was beneath them to go online. and now they are crying. the WSJ was an exception to this for a few years, but there are some good financial bloggers out there now that will give them a lot of competition.

I remember 10 years ago if you wanted to sell your apartment in NYC you had to advertise in the NY Times and pay their ridiculous rates. and the supposedly liberal pro-blue collar newspaper that the NY Times is supposed to be has the snobbiest RE section i've ever seen. on sundays you would see people walking around with a copy of the Real Estate section checking out buildings to buy in. these days the realtors still advertise in the NY Times but it's a generic add with the same properties that probably aren't on the market anymore and the goal is to get people to call the office. not to sell a specific property. all the properties for sale are listed on redfin, craiglist, MLS which is open to everyone now

and there have been so many new immigrants in the NYC area lately that it makes sense to advertise in their ethnic non-english newspapers as well.

Re:the real threat will be government intervention

[mikael_j]

I take it by your "government is always worse than private sector" bias that you're most likely american.

Here in Sweden the general consensus seems to be that SVT ("Sveriges Television" lit. "The swedish television") is the most reliable broadcaster while private ones are considered a lot less reliable by most people except for the extreme right who insist on SVT being "communist", "leftist" and "government controlled", they even use these descriptions now even though we currently have a right-wing coalition government.

What's important is that there is separation between government-funded media outlets and the government that funds them, not that governments shouldn't fund media outlets (SVT has a lot of advantages over privately funded television networks, such as how they can broadcast shows that only appeal to a fairly small subset of the population while the private networks prefer constantly going for the least common denominator).

/Mikael

Re:the real threat will be government intervention

[MikeBabcock]

Neither of you replied to precisely the point I made -- you can't trust anything you read or hear in the media right now because there is no standard of truth to which they are legally bound.

I mentioned only Fox News because they're the ones who fought for the right to lie to the public, not because I think there's any difference between them and the rest. In fact my argument implied the opposite -- that I think all media can and will lie to us at any time for ratings.

You can find the reporting on the case from whichever outlet you prefer by Googling something like "fox news truth first amendment florida court case" which worked for me, although several of the headlines seem to read things like "Fox News gets okay to misinform public".

I love how you put words in my mouth, by the way, without asking what kind of regulation I'd insinuated at all because you believe that government people are inherently more crooked than private sector people.

I believe strongly that Fox News should have lost this case, that knowingly publishing falsehoods and claiming them to be true ought to be illegal for any media outlet, and I believe most of the American public expects this to be the case already when it clearly is not.

PS the First Amendment is government intervention. Jeez.