6 ms·

Tech Is Eating Media – Now What?

19 points by look_lookatme 11y ago

debacle 11y ago
The media is eating the media. In their thirst for viewers and money they are looking for news anywhere they can find it, making them untrustworthy in reporting both the scope and depth of issues on both a global and local scale. People are tired of being told by some tart on CNN that bird flu is going to kill everyone before ISIS has a chance to turn them gay.
aet 11y ago
This piece has left me confused
mc32 11y ago
Journalism, "the press", isn't used to being called out. They used to be the ones beyond reproach, the defenders of the faith. Now, struggling for readership and revenue /income, they have been riding the coattails of watered down investigative reporting with a flash of click-bait and "social mood". That's to say they aren't following an immutable compass but rather the vagaries of the day, hoping one of those spaghetti strands sticks one day and saves them. They are too often chasing acceptance in hopes this will drive up revenues. I'm not sure they ever were the fourth estate, but certainly now with their self interested survival on the line, they don't even try to fake it any more.
- feedjoelpie 11y ago
  Does anyone have details on the financial health of The Economist? They don't play this dumbed down new media game, and while I'm sure they're not gangbusters, they do appear quite a bit more stable than the other traditional outlets that _have_ tried to get in on clickbait.
  - danso 11y ago
    The Economist was until recently owned by Pearson, the mammoth education/publishing house, which is why they were able to maintain quality without worrying so much about revenue. However, they aren't a loss-leader and they've been making a profit. Recently, Pearson sold its 50% stake to another private entity: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/pearson-sale-economist/401120/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/pearson-... Apparently, the Economist publishes its financials even though it is not a public company: > According to its most recent results [1], the company had an operating profit of about $93.8 million, up 2 percent for the year. The weekly magazine’s circulation was 1.6 million, and the company saw a 13 percent increase in gross profit from circulation. [1] http://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/results_at_a_glance.html http://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/results...
  - ghaff 11y ago
    While true, they're one of a small handful of English language mainstream global news publications able to command premium subscriptions. I'm not sure to what degree you can generalize their success to publications with a less well-established brand. That's not to say there aren't alternatives to clickbait though. There are a couple of newish tech news sites that don't go the listicle and clickbait route.
  - clusterfoo 11y ago
    The Economist is a prime example that quality still sells, and always will. Even their new daily newsletters are top-notch. IMHO they get right what most "old media" are getting wrong: The Economist isn't trying to compete with new media at what new media does best. I don't need a magazine for opinion pieces, I have blogs for that; I don't need my local newspaper to tell me about Lady Gaga's new acting career, I don't need a magazine to tell me what's new and cool in fashion or music, and I certainly don't need CNN to tell me what's trending on twitter. Give it up. You can't compete with the masses for that type of content. What I can't get from blogs and twitter is quality journalism: investigation, inside scoops, quality political analysis, etc. When traditional media realizes that this is the domain where they excel, they will be just fine. Instead of cutting down on their investigative journalism departments, slash the entertainment reporters, slash opinion and talking heads. Cut your content in half, cut your staff, stop wasting resources on a hopeless battle, and focus on the one thing no blog or YouTube channel can do... give me concise, focused, quality journalism.
    - VOYD 11y ago
      Meh, my manager says quality costs too much. JK
- williamcotton 11y ago
  The fourth estate is an essential component of our system of governance. This really is without debate as you couldn't possibly have a system of democracy without a way to inform the voting public as to who is running and what promises they are making. The problem with your line of thinking is that you're trying to say that the news media is just like anything else that is competing for resources and attention. You're only describing the world through private interests. With your critique you're placing "journalism" in an interchangeable roll with "Call of Duty", cynically denying its public roll in our society. We absolutely need to address the broader societal changes brought about by technological changes. An economic approach is not enough. Our systems of law and order are incredibly complex. Governance is an ever evolving call-and-response that attempts to balance individual rights with the needs of the greater good. We need to hold ourselves and the rest of the citizens of the world to these high standards, as our forebears have done for generations, or we may lose the wondrous liberties they fought so hard to maintain.
  - mc32 11y ago
    It would seem, at first blush, the fourth estate is being replaced by the people themselves, in the form of whistleblowers with access to social media as well as the population at large petitioning (organizing awareness) via social media, so the press are being subverted by the people. They don't call the shots. They don't decide what's right and wrong with government. It's the people and whistleblowers with social media tools at their disposal. So now the press try to catch up to the social winds and try to latch on perhaps tacking on their philosophical take and their view of social contracts and responsibility (as their token value add), but they are no longer the driving force. They simply are now trying to ride the wave. A few are able to keep their course and continue to produce valuable content that people are willing to pay for, as people have noted, the economist, among a few others.
    - williamcotton 11y ago
      The previous platform for newspapers was public in nature. These new social media platforms have consolidated and are managed by a few private corporations. As a private company, like a private individual, they have every right to decide what should or shouldn't be hanging on their walls, so to speak. Standing on a corner and selling a political pamphlet, journal or newspaper is the foundation of the fourth estate. This happened on public streets and sidewalks, not in pseudo-public spaces like today's shopping malls or corporate-owned courtyards. It came with publicly sanctioned protections for the right to do so. If the old media are dying off to be replaced by these new forms that are digital and self-published in nature, we need to have a very serious conversation about the dangers of these pseudo-public spaces like Facebook and Twitter, who get to decide not only how but which people see what is published. Unrelated, but perhaps the dangers of direct democracy are present in the advent of direct media, in a way that would have been unpredictable to those who set up the original checks and balances. Should we try to come up with better public platforms for publishing that take some of these issues in to consideration?
- Umn55 11y ago
  Oswald spengler - decline of the west Spengler on... Democracy, media, and money Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. The thorough penetration of money's power throughout a society is yet another marker of the shift from Culture to Civilization. Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler's argument. The "tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers" is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective. The principles of equality, natural rights, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press are all disguises for class war (the bourgeois against the aristocracy). Freedom, to Spengler, is a negative concept, simply entailing the repudiation of any tradition. In reality, freedom of the press requires money, and entails ownership, thus serving money at the end. Suffrage involves electioneering, in which the donations rule the day. The ideologies espoused by candidates, whether Socialism or Liberalism, are set in motion by, and ultimately serve, only money. "Free" press does not spread free opinion—it generates opinion, Spengler maintains. Spengler admits that in his era money has already won, in the form of democracy. But in destroying the old elements of the Culture, it prepares the way for the rise of a new and overpowering figure: the Caesar. Before such a leader, money collapses, and in the Imperial Age the politics of money fades away. Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever.
7Figures2Commas 11y ago
This unhealthy obsession with eating in tech is starting to give me indigestion.
shockzzz 11y ago
OP is probably right. Though it doesn't seem radically different than what's happened with journalism before, as alluded to regarding TV. I'm sure it happened with print, and I'm sure it happened with whatever existed before that.
CM30 11y ago
The biggest problem with the press (and why the internet and technology is 'eating' it) is that their business model is based in a world that doesn't really exist any more. The old school media offered a quick barrage of articles on a wide variety of topics. They didn't cover any one particularly well (just look at a newspaper article about a topic you're in a expert in if you want proof of that), but they did decently enough at informing people in an age where information was inconvenient or costly to otherwise get. The internet changed that. For any important news, you can find better sources on social media, since people at the scene will probably now be posting photos and opinions about the goings on as they're happening, no reporter required. For timely news, social media and aggregator sites simply do better than journalists, since they don't have to worry about editors or proofing and there's a large crowd of people looking for stories at the same time (usually many times larger than the team in a professional newspaper). And for more informative pieces, you can just go straight to the experts now. Whereas before you'd have a journalist approach an expert on say, information security, you can now just find an expert's blog or a relevant forum or subreddit instead. Bonus points for their words likely not being censored or altered or anything else. And the fourth estate thing? Well, for better or worse, now that seems to be the legions of bloggers and amateur journalists online instead. The traditional media kind of gave up on that when most of the papers and news channels were bought by large companies. You can try paywalls and subscriptions and patreon type systems all you like, I just suspect the old way of doing news simply cannot work in the internet era, and the traditional journalist is simply becoming obsolete. For the article's question about how the relationship is supposed to work and what media built on newer platforms will be like... it'll be amateurs and companies reporting the news on their own.

19 points by look_lookatme 11y ago

The media is eating the media. In their thirst for viewers and money they are looking for news anywhere they can find it, making them untrustworthy in reporting both the scope and depth of issues on both a global and local scale. People are tired of being told by some tart on CNN that bird flu is going to kill everyone before ISIS has a chance to turn them gay.

aet 11y ago

This piece has left me confused

mc32 11y ago

Journalism, "the press", isn't used to being called out. They used to be the ones beyond reproach, the defenders of the faith. Now, struggling for readership and revenue /income, they have been riding the coattails of watered down investigative reporting with a flash of click-bait and "social mood". That's to say they aren't following an immutable compass but rather the vagaries of the day, hoping one of those spaghetti strands sticks one day and saves them. They are too often chasing acceptance in hopes this will drive up revenues. I'm not sure they ever were the fourth estate, but certainly now with their self interested survival on the line, they don't even try to fake it any more.

feedjoelpie 11y ago
Does anyone have details on the financial health of The Economist? They don't play this dumbed down new media game, and while I'm sure they're not gangbusters, they do appear quite a bit more stable than the other traditional outlets that _have_ tried to get in on clickbait.
- danso 11y ago
  The Economist was until recently owned by Pearson, the mammoth education/publishing house, which is why they were able to maintain quality without worrying so much about revenue. However, they aren't a loss-leader and they've been making a profit. Recently, Pearson sold its 50% stake to another private entity: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/pearson-sale-economist/401120/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/pearson-... Apparently, the Economist publishes its financials even though it is not a public company: > According to its most recent results [1], the company had an operating profit of about $93.8 million, up 2 percent for the year. The weekly magazine’s circulation was 1.6 million, and the company saw a 13 percent increase in gross profit from circulation. [1] http://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/results_at_a_glance.html http://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/results...
- ghaff 11y ago
  While true, they're one of a small handful of English language mainstream global news publications able to command premium subscriptions. I'm not sure to what degree you can generalize their success to publications with a less well-established brand. That's not to say there aren't alternatives to clickbait though. There are a couple of newish tech news sites that don't go the listicle and clickbait route.
- clusterfoo 11y ago
  The Economist is a prime example that quality still sells, and always will. Even their new daily newsletters are top-notch. IMHO they get right what most "old media" are getting wrong: The Economist isn't trying to compete with new media at what new media does best. I don't need a magazine for opinion pieces, I have blogs for that; I don't need my local newspaper to tell me about Lady Gaga's new acting career, I don't need a magazine to tell me what's new and cool in fashion or music, and I certainly don't need CNN to tell me what's trending on twitter. Give it up. You can't compete with the masses for that type of content. What I can't get from blogs and twitter is quality journalism: investigation, inside scoops, quality political analysis, etc. When traditional media realizes that this is the domain where they excel, they will be just fine. Instead of cutting down on their investigative journalism departments, slash the entertainment reporters, slash opinion and talking heads. Cut your content in half, cut your staff, stop wasting resources on a hopeless battle, and focus on the one thing no blog or YouTube channel can do... give me concise, focused, quality journalism.
  - VOYD 11y ago
    Meh, my manager says quality costs too much. JK
williamcotton 11y ago
The fourth estate is an essential component of our system of governance. This really is without debate as you couldn't possibly have a system of democracy without a way to inform the voting public as to who is running and what promises they are making. The problem with your line of thinking is that you're trying to say that the news media is just like anything else that is competing for resources and attention. You're only describing the world through private interests. With your critique you're placing "journalism" in an interchangeable roll with "Call of Duty", cynically denying its public roll in our society. We absolutely need to address the broader societal changes brought about by technological changes. An economic approach is not enough. Our systems of law and order are incredibly complex. Governance is an ever evolving call-and-response that attempts to balance individual rights with the needs of the greater good. We need to hold ourselves and the rest of the citizens of the world to these high standards, as our forebears have done for generations, or we may lose the wondrous liberties they fought so hard to maintain.
- mc32 11y ago
  It would seem, at first blush, the fourth estate is being replaced by the people themselves, in the form of whistleblowers with access to social media as well as the population at large petitioning (organizing awareness) via social media, so the press are being subverted by the people. They don't call the shots. They don't decide what's right and wrong with government. It's the people and whistleblowers with social media tools at their disposal. So now the press try to catch up to the social winds and try to latch on perhaps tacking on their philosophical take and their view of social contracts and responsibility (as their token value add), but they are no longer the driving force. They simply are now trying to ride the wave. A few are able to keep their course and continue to produce valuable content that people are willing to pay for, as people have noted, the economist, among a few others.
  - williamcotton 11y ago
    The previous platform for newspapers was public in nature. These new social media platforms have consolidated and are managed by a few private corporations. As a private company, like a private individual, they have every right to decide what should or shouldn't be hanging on their walls, so to speak. Standing on a corner and selling a political pamphlet, journal or newspaper is the foundation of the fourth estate. This happened on public streets and sidewalks, not in pseudo-public spaces like today's shopping malls or corporate-owned courtyards. It came with publicly sanctioned protections for the right to do so. If the old media are dying off to be replaced by these new forms that are digital and self-published in nature, we need to have a very serious conversation about the dangers of these pseudo-public spaces like Facebook and Twitter, who get to decide not only how but which people see what is published. Unrelated, but perhaps the dangers of direct democracy are present in the advent of direct media, in a way that would have been unpredictable to those who set up the original checks and balances. Should we try to come up with better public platforms for publishing that take some of these issues in to consideration?
Umn55 11y ago
Oswald spengler - decline of the west Spengler on... Democracy, media, and money Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. The thorough penetration of money's power throughout a society is yet another marker of the shift from Culture to Civilization. Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler's argument. The "tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers" is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective. The principles of equality, natural rights, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press are all disguises for class war (the bourgeois against the aristocracy). Freedom, to Spengler, is a negative concept, simply entailing the repudiation of any tradition. In reality, freedom of the press requires money, and entails ownership, thus serving money at the end. Suffrage involves electioneering, in which the donations rule the day. The ideologies espoused by candidates, whether Socialism or Liberalism, are set in motion by, and ultimately serve, only money. "Free" press does not spread free opinion—it generates opinion, Spengler maintains. Spengler admits that in his era money has already won, in the form of democracy. But in destroying the old elements of the Culture, it prepares the way for the rise of a new and overpowering figure: the Caesar. Before such a leader, money collapses, and in the Imperial Age the politics of money fades away. Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever.

7Figures2Commas 11y ago

This unhealthy obsession with eating in tech is starting to give me indigestion.

shockzzz 11y ago

OP is probably right. Though it doesn't seem radically different than what's happened with journalism before, as alluded to regarding TV. I'm sure it happened with print, and I'm sure it happened with whatever existed before that.

CM30 11y ago

The biggest problem with the press (and why the internet and technology is 'eating' it) is that their business model is based in a world that doesn't really exist any more. The old school media offered a quick barrage of articles on a wide variety of topics. They didn't cover any one particularly well (just look at a newspaper article about a topic you're in a expert in if you want proof of that), but they did decently enough at informing people in an age where information was inconvenient or costly to otherwise get. The internet changed that. For any important news, you can find better sources on social media, since people at the scene will probably now be posting photos and opinions about the goings on as they're happening, no reporter required. For timely news, social media and aggregator sites simply do better than journalists, since they don't have to worry about editors or proofing and there's a large crowd of people looking for stories at the same time (usually many times larger than the team in a professional newspaper). And for more informative pieces, you can just go straight to the experts now. Whereas before you'd have a journalist approach an expert on say, information security, you can now just find an expert's blog or a relevant forum or subreddit instead. Bonus points for their words likely not being censored or altered or anything else. And the fourth estate thing? Well, for better or worse, now that seems to be the legions of bloggers and amateur journalists online instead. The traditional media kind of gave up on that when most of the papers and news channels were bought by large companies. You can try paywalls and subscriptions and patreon type systems all you like, I just suspect the old way of doing news simply cannot work in the internet era, and the traditional journalist is simply becoming obsolete. For the article's question about how the relationship is supposed to work and what media built on newer platforms will be like... it'll be amateurs and companies reporting the news on their own.