[ExI] future of news media, was RE: autism/vaccination link

spike spike66 at att.net
Mon Jun 1 05:58:36 UTC 2009


 

> ...On Behalf Of Emlyn
> 
> 2009/5/30 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
> > ...
> >
> > A good example was that article I posted yesterday on Bernoulli 
> > numbers, where the mainstream press went on and on about 
> the formula 
> > being found by a teenage Swedish immigrant from Iraq, 
> paragraph after 
> > paragraph in one news story after another, but none of them would 
> > actually just write out the damn formula!  None!  ... spike
> 
> ...
> 
> Also, I'll go ahead and blame the mainstream media here. I 
> think we're increasingly seeing them fall behind the 'net as 
> a good way of providing information... Emlyn

Ja.  I still haven't figured out a way for the traditional media to find
some place to exist.  When newspapers were still relevant, they provided
more than just the news stories.  They were deciding for us which stories
are important and which were to be relegated or ignored.  With the internet,
there is no need to control for paper space, since it doesn't actually cost
anything to publish stories.  There is no editor to decide for us which
stories are important.  We all become our own editors.

Let us watch this closely, for in the past, news sources were few, and
tended to be a converging influence on the population.  Now we have replaced
that with diverging influences.

Another point: traditional news media need to do more and more for less and
less.  They are getting the old pressure for better, faster, cheaper.  Well,
they have been forced to choose faster and cheaper.

As a prediction, I see news media becoming more like FoxNews.  Reasoning:
Fox is often thought to be the source with the most ideological slant, but
consider an alternate notion.  Fox is actually the most well-run news source
from strictly a business point of view.  One need only recognize that the
news companies are not in business to report the news, but rather they are
in business to make money.  Look at it from that perspective, and everything
you see there makes perfect sense.

I predict that the other news sources will soon recognize that Fox is making
a killing, whereas their companies are starving.

Next, I can imagine a case where a news agency does not have a hundred full
time staff, but rather a dozen staffers and a few thousand occasional
contributors, who actually do something else for a living, but who are
subject matter experts, who contribute when they see some big development in
their narrow field of expertise.  That makes news agencies a little like
this list.  Of course, much of what we will see in the news will be
irrelevant junk: the latest blondie to disappear, Hollywood stars
misbehaving and so forth, but that is what sells ad space, so that is what
we get.

Here is a graph showing the stock price for the past five years of the
McClatchy Company, which owns newspapers.  This pretty much tells it all:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=McClatchy&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:
en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=we

spike







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