It’s not always entertaining, because it’s not there to entertain you. It’s not glamorous, certainly not efficient, can’t be managed by robots, and at its best, not always popular. It requires effort. It’s there to keep you awake with your wits about you.
https://twitter.com/VanityFair/status/1090255765082947584
Who wants that during a hard day’s night? In a sense, that’s why ALL journalism is struggling as we entertain ourselves to death. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_O…
Internet discourse provided a red herring for a couple of decades. Apparently, the struggle of journalism was limited to “traditional journalism,” a by-product of sweeping technological changes, that...
... like all technological changes and home remedies are always good for us even if they taste awful. Print will go away and be replaced by shiny tablets or phones which will perform much the same role. All will be well. The end.
The real problem is commerce. It’s our economic system and our business practices that are failing to support journalism.
It’s a problem of diversity versus concentration. Diversity meaning pure variation, NOT the skin color and gender or the usual “diversity,” although that’s certainly one type.
As @JillAbramson points out, the few giants will survive; it’s diversity, smallness, and localization that will need to be sacrificed. Google and Facebook will make it, the Rocky Mountain News won’t.
Looks like our journalism landscape is merely mimicking our commercial landscape, where only a few oligarchs survive to consume all others.
We allow the comparison of media through one lens only: the number of eyeballs delivered. We call eyeballs many clever things, like “community;” just look at Facebook’s sell sheet.
But eyeballs are all you can fundamentally sell; the number of people frequently and habitually interested in your content.
We put the New York “bloody” Times, Cosmo online and its many variations, YouTube, and porn, in one marketplace where decompression time is highly compressed, a marketplace that responds mainly to emotional entertainment.
Only the New York Times is not there to entertain you; it’s there to keep you awake with your wits about you.
The @nytimes, the @BostonGlobe, and all newspapers, have a civic role. It is the reason you have a free press, an umbrella where @HBO and Alex Jones alike operate with reasonable freedom, but the Globe itself is not there to entertain.
The @sfchronicle is on a screen which is acting as your TV; along with Facebook, Showtime, and NBC sport or whatever. There is no, “I’ll read the paper; I’ll listen to the radio; I’ll watch TV; I’ll do my taxes.” It’s the same damned spot.
We sell eyeballs and then ask the Christian Science Monitor to measure itself by the same commercial criteria as pure entertainment. If this was a science fiction plotline, it would be criticized for being too Kafka. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kaf…
In the eyes of pure commerce, the Cincinnati @Enquirer does not measure up in the eyeballs bazaar and is frequently crushed by hockeyfights(dot)com, or animal baby videos.
The NYTimes cannot compete with Rush Limbaugh, not because Rush is better, although he is certainly more commercially viable. The problem isn’t Rush, or the NYTimes. The problem is commerce.
The @denverpost has a social role that is vital far beyond its commercial value.
The press is there to tell the objective history of our time so we can make civic decisions. That is why it was made free, a protective umbrella under which all media operate but don’t always pull their share of the civic weight.
Our economic model is unable to sustain entities such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer..
...around 1800 of which have shut down in the United States since 2004, even though we need them to keep an eye on our democracy. That SHOULD be our economic model’s problem and not the press’s problem. bbc.com/news/world-us-…
We have to agree that civics is often NOT entertaining then reconcile business and society accordingly.
We have to figure out a way to practice commerce that does not decimate prerequisite aspects of our democracy. That should be objectively possible given that we are spending serious money trying to go to Mars. chooseoneshop.com/shop/post-trut…
@threadreaderapp unroll please!
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