Posted on 05/09/2005 10:06:27 AM PDT by CHARLITE
The year is 2014. The press as we know it no longer exists. Traditional reporting has collapsed. News is churned out by the media giant Googlezon (Google has taken over many companies and joined forces with Amazon). The news consists of blogs, attitudes, discoveries, preferences, claims and random thoughts, gathered and shaped by computers and human editors, and fed back to ordinary people. The New York Times has become a newsletter read only by the elite and the elderly.
This is the finding of a clever eight-minute mock documentary, "Epic 2014," produced by the fictional Museum of Media History (in reality, journalists Matt Thompson of the Fresno Bee and Robin Sloan of Current, a new cable news channel in San Francisco).
The mockumentary arrives at a time of unusually high anxiety for the news industry. Publishers are nervous - some would say paralyzed with fright - over polls showing that young adults are not reading papers.
Rupert Murdoch, speaking at the recent convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, warned that newspapers risked being "relegated to the status of also-rans" if they don't make use of the Internet.
The older electronic media are nervous, too. According to Advertising Age, Google and Yahoo will take in as much ad money this year as the prime-time revenues of the three major television networks combined. Another sign of the times: Bloggers are now trying to set up a consortium to draw heavy advertising themselves.
In the mockumentary, the new electronic media basically blow away the old media by paying attention to what people want, most of which would be called soft news or non-news today. Computers strip and splice items, adjusting for each user's needs and preferences. News is prioritized by the number of users who read each item.
Taken at face value, most of the video is plausible and scary. Without gatekeepers, no one stands ready to verify reports as accurate, so there is no difference between real news and agreed-upon gossip or low-level fluff.
Issues debated today - whether bloggers are real journalists, for instance, or whether there is a clear line between news and entertainment - would be irrelevant.
Reporters would be paid in accordance with how popular their stories are. Lots of luck if your job is to cover Rwanda or global warming.
"Epic 2014" is a very sharp bit of media analysis.
Check it out at http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/.
"Taken at face value, most of the video is plausible and scary. Without gatekeepers, no one stands ready to verify reports as accurate, so there is no difference between real news and agreed-upon gossip or low-level fluff."
And this is different from the NY Times making up stories because.....
(listens to the crickets chirping while waiting for an answer)
But what if those gatekeepers pass out forged memos as "fake but accurate".
We're all going to have to rethink how we deal with the Internet. As exciting as these new developments are, there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function... ." Hillary Rodham Clinton, February 11, 1998
"The New York Times has become a newsletter read only by the elite and the elderly..."
...meanwhile Free Republic celebrates its 28th birthday.
Great point, cloud8! "A New Day Dawning" comes to mind, and it was dawn 28 years ago. The old gray lady just didn't know it yet.........and, by the way, "fake but accurate" kind of sums up the whole arrogant mind set of the liberal media. It reveals their pretzel logic, and the effort to be right at all costs........even at the cost of ordinary, man-in-the-street common sense. Dan Rather made that self-contradictory remark while somehow believing that it made sense!
........about as much sense as handing out counterfeit $100 dollar bills, advising people that they aren't real, but will buy you $100 worth of merchandise anyway, because check-out clerks usually don't recognize counterfeit money.
"The New York Times has become a newsletter read only by the elite and the elderly..."
You mean, read only by the pretentious and ugly, don't you?
Actually, newsletters are the state of the art, ranging from bad to the genre of these times. The art of communications is newsletters, email, electronic posting/blogs. The newspaper was the state of the art in the nineteenth century, got displaced by television and radio in the twentieth century, and are still trying to convince themselves that history always repeats itself and they will be the Next Big Thing -- so hang on to your shares and jobs at your local newspaper.
Meanwhile, history and life has passed them by. Diligent monitors of literature on all the media will note that perusing the mass media for valuable information becomes less productive with each passing day. Most of it is just things you don't need to know and are just wasting your time.
The real communications and information is coming increasingly from the newsletters, emails, postings, blogs. The quality depends on what your personal network is. The mass media has monopolized a market people are questioning whether it has any value at all. Is there still a major mover or thinker in their readership after they've suppressed all the voices but their own? -- and judging from their letters to the editor, they're still searching for signs of intelligent life. They drove off the intelligent readers to these emerging alternative forums which was the predictable stupid mistake.
By insisting that they had to be on top of the pecking order, they had to shrink the pond so small, that it became a puddle against the vast background of an ocean of information that they could not control. They set the rules, but everybody else decided not to play their game. Their confusion and anomie is palpable.
Thanks Mike. (Nice to hear from you again!) You're absolutely right. What a well reasoned comment on your part. The old media was dreaming, if they imagined that they could continue to insult the intelligence of the public without consequence. As Bernard Goldberg rightly states ("Bias" & "Arrogance"), they all live in the same hermitically-sealed "elite" bubble - coctail and dinner parties on the upper east side in NYC, in D.C. and out on the left coast.
They ignored the "fly-over" folks, and now that appalling insult has come back to bite them. You can tell by the way they are now scratching their collective wooden heads, trying to "reach out" to small town America. I'd say they're more than a day late and many dollars short in their new campaign to win over hearts and minds. "Fly-over" people are into the 21st century and have long since figured out "old media's" agendas.
> "fake but accurate" kind of sums up the whole arrogant mind set of the liberal media.
You bet it does, along with this idea that Dan, Peter, the NYT et al. should be self-appointed information gatekeepers. Talk about arrogance! I will decide what information is worth my attention, thank you. Generations ago, major cities had morning and evening editions of several newspapers (imagine that!) and one could sift through their various slants to arrive at some semblance of the facts--just like we do on the Internet. Except the Net is faster and access to all sorts of information is free and unrestricted.
You've seen the story on Animal Planet:
How the old king of beasts get driven off by the new king of beasts -- but that generation doesn't want to give up power and status long past their primes -- so you see the Helen Thomases, Dan Rathers, Art Rooneys, Jimmy Carters being carried out in body bags -- still insisting they're our appointed leaders to the Promised Land.
This kind of reluctant turnover is unprecedented -- because those people usually died of heart attacks at age 50. Thanks to modern medicine, we witness them degrading before our eyes -- while they're insisting they're still coming into their prime. I think Betty Davis did a couple of movies about this sad demise and resulting delusions of continued relevance and glory.
The chief perpetrator is the valuing of seniority over merit -- that is killing all those established institutions. The talent of a whole generation is being shut out -- so that the merely entrenched can hang on for forty or fifty years on sheer inertia and unchallenged tradition -- instead of their maturing and moving on to the next level of maturity and wisdom. Instead, they buy a few nips and tucks and think they're as good as new -- instead of showing their age in their antiquated thoughts and world view. They think being liberal is remaining eternally youthful, recapturing and reliving their own naivete and idealism. Now they just pretend to be so -- but their lips and faces are no longer moving.
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