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Uncategorized: News War
Published on 27/02/07
by Zac Echola
Frontline’s series on the news just wrapped up a few minutes ago. I had a big post planned for today, but ended up in an argument about news with a friend in D.C.
If you happened to miss any of it, PBS has the whole series up on their Web site.
I’ll post excerpts from the argument about the program later and save the other post about newspaper business for tomorrow.
…
EDIT: Here’s an excerpt from that argument with a friend from Blog on the Internet that held up tonights post (I apologize for some of the language, we were in the thick of it, but the topics will be discussed in greater length tomorrow):
me: you’re making the second part of my argument for me… haha. I think specialization is a good thing. But I don’t think most people only read about one specialized topic. They read many.
So news papers need to clearly define themselves
Nederlandsk: maybe, but saying that its a good thing to let general sources of information go into decline is a poor idea
a newspaper should be a starting point and nothing more – the avlue of specialization is unquestionable
but if you give up the newspaper, then you are the harvard curriculum
where you manage to learn about the impact of television on papua new ginuea in the 1970s
but fail to learn about the cold war
in your history core curriculuum
and just because you also took a course on the music of the zimbabwean tribal people years 1875-1925 does not make up for the lack of general knowledge about the world
i suppose at the end of the day, i would rather meet someone who knows something about everything than everything about a couple somethings
because the former can bullshit his way through anything, whereas the latter is just a fuckin bore
me: I agree with that, but that’s an ideaology that doesn’t sell newspapers every morning.
Nederlandsk: so are you into marketing
or the media
:)
i dont give a shit if it sells newspapers, im going to be pissed off if all the sources of it disappear — it’s valuable to society and ought to be there, whether people take that much advantage of it or not
one of the worst developments of the internet is the tendency for people to simply read links brought to them by somebody they agree with and aleady summarized and spun for them
me: Yeah Rattner says the same thing
Nederlandsk: it was bad enough when cable news started acting as gatekeeper and commentator with the rise of fox but now it’s even fucking worse
me: and then suggests newspapers go non-profit
Nederlandsk: and yes, perhaps people can keep moving further and further into their own little worlds but sooner or later the fact that half of americans still believe that saddam hussein was connected to 9/11 is going to catch up with us
and i can assure you an equal amount of delusion exists on the left wing
and the more seriously people take dipshits like markos moulswhatever the worse its going to get — but i dont think people as a whole will continue to stand for it
me: oh shit what day is it
Nederlandsk: i think what we’ve been experiencing is a rise of the fringes that has been brought forth by them having a brand new megaphone for them
oh fuck its frontline time
me: shit shit shit
Nederlandsk: 3 minutes
nice save
gotta call this chick real quick
and ill continue my tirade
:)
me: yeah, but I think the fringes are controlling the mainstream media right now. Eventually I could see it balancing out with people getting their information through aggregators of media like google news or digg
where news that is most important to the largest number of people bubbles to the top to become the general news source
instead of some greybeards in new york deciding what’s most important for us
…
Nederlandsk: the fringes dont control the msm
marketers do
me: I suppose, but they’re marketing to particularly fringe markets
…
me: I mean, I don’t think people should be given what they want
I think people should be able to find what they want
and since they don’t find that in newspapers
that’s why newspapers are losing
Nederlandsk: no
newspapers are losing because theyre trying to compete
if they did what they do best, and no one else can do
they would still be relevant
me: well that’s part of it
Nederlandsk: instead they close everything and put britney on a1
me: they’re trying to market to people who watch Dateline
but people who read newspapers probably don’t watch Dateline
Nederlandsk: right
me: at least certain newspapers
Nederlandsk: this is what im sayin
and blogs are great and all but some retards with a blog in tajiakistan
does not compete with a foreign bureau in central asia
me: but that’s still a niche that newspapers need to define themselves in
so
that’s the point of this post
or will be
Nederlandsk: yeah
my point on media is that im an old man
me: newspapers need to take their lumps in readership
Nederlandsk: i think they just managed to gloss over that the most important thing that destroyed news was the availability of more sources of shit to watch
me: from the general public
Nederlandsk: people used to watch the evening news because there was nothing else on
:)
me: and provide other products as well
…
The end. Or is it?
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