Tech Is Eating Media – Now What?
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
Even the traditionally held conservative commentators like Edmund Burke railed against things like the British East Indies Company and warned against "corporate tyranny".
That the State ought to confine itself to what regards the State, or the creatures of the State, namely, the exterior establishment of its religion; its magistracy; its revenue; its military force by sea and land; the corporations that owe their existence to its fiat; in a word, to every thing that is truly and properly public, to the public peace, to the public safety, to the public order, to the public prosperity.
What you're failing to recognize is that we've already given companies like Facebook a public platform through our system of corporate legal structures and more obviously though things like network neutrality.
Facebook, like any corporation or any faction of private interest, will take as much territory as it is possibly allowed. It is up to external checks from a government "of the people by the people for the people" to regulate and contain these factional interests.
Federalist #10 does a much better job with the discussions related to factional interest than I could ever hope to fit in to a comment box, as do the writings of Paine, Jefferson and, I really can't recommend him enough, especially to the economically minded, Edmund Burke.
Also, all of the discussion and legal precedent around the anti-trust laws are very pertinent to any discussions of the limits of corporate power.
And yes, in case it isn't clear, what I am arguing for is a form of conservatism, but a form not predicated on dogma. Think Chesterton's fence.
I haven't failed to recognize the issues you raise. I have opted to let them be until we collectively know what we actually want our public platforms to look like, as expressed through individual choices. Please, I beg of you sir, do not mistake silence on a subject for an explicit endorsement of corporatism.
I fear people overestimate the openness of privately run newspapers, they even have "editors". Twitter et al don't have "editors" overseeing content.
I think we're better off today than we were in the heyday of newspapers. And you're free to print or electronically distribute your political pamphlets.
The problem is we're beginning to replace all of that with a discourse that takes place only on privately owned and operated social media networks.
There is no public space on the web, just a network of private nodes. Unlike roads and walkways, the edges on this graph are non-existent. We can't bump in to people in between web sites, we can only interact with them inside of a private home, with private rules and private interests.
This is fundamentally different than the environment that lead to a constitution that included a promise of the freedom of the press. There is no freedom of the press for publishers on Facebook or Twitter, they can and do manipulate what and how things appear to advance their own corporate interests.
Our rights to the freedom of the press are public rights, like our rights to free speech and to congregate in groups, both of which are integral components to a functioning democracy.
Running your own website is nothing more than having your own private home, with images and words written on your own private walls. You have to invite someone inside to see it.
Private social networks take the roll of a pseudo-public space, much like a shopping mall. It may LOOK like a public square, but they can kick you out for any reason. They can decide who is allowed to operate a business and they can decide what is or isn't allowed to be said.
The erosion of our public spaces started long before Facebook but private social media hubs seem to be accelerating the pace.
This isn't about being better or worse off based on some arbitrary assessment, it's about recognizing the there are fundamental changes happening to society. If we're to expect things to continue to be peaceful and orderly we're going to have to make sure the ship stays the course.
Disruption as a philosophy is brash and arrogant and it makes sense that we're having issues with the transfer of institutional knowledge from the previous generation. We're still training lawyers and statesmen, but as far as Silicon Valley is concerned, they're destined to be replaced by software. Who is making this software and why the should anyone trust them to have any clue as to how to maintain society?
I think it is quite possible for us to update the fundamentals of our public infrastructure to the digital age, but it can't happen solely based on the self-interested profit motivations of private companies. It needs public oversight. How individuals communicate with one another is clearly a matter of public interest and one that any conservative or liberal should hold as fundamental a roll of government as enforcing private property and the right to a fair trail.
Anything outside of this scope of our existing law and order is revolutionary. But who are the revolutionaries and what do the rest of us stand to gain?
A lot of Silicon Valley's actions are basic and blatant disregards for the law, be it intellectual property with a website like YouTube or zoning and housing violations with AirBnB. Facebook fancies itself one day having a private system of revenue sharing for publishers, instead of our previous public system of copyright that gave constitutional charge for congress to regulate.
All of this is sold as innovation, yet it just seems like a short-circuit fueled by consumerism, with a hell of a lot of external costs being loaded on to public infrastructure.
We as a people give a charter to Facebook to operate as a company. It's not the other way around. Facebook is lucky that we have given them the privilege of a corporate charter. Facebook is lucky that it exists on top of a publicly mandated network neutrality.
The general feeling in Silicon Valley is that tech companies are entitled to this public infrastructure yet not at all responsible to public oversight.
Public oversight is spoken of like a communicable disease in this industry yet public oversight is what makes our marketplaces function and keep our legal systems working.
What if you could only start a corporation as a favor from a senator? What if we didn't have court-appointed lawyers? What if we copyright or trademark weren't equally granted nor equally enforced? What if there were no limits on private monopoly?
What if there were no public forums for debate?
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.
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.