(Occasionally my little tours of the web seem to develop a narrative thread all on their own. This is one of those days.)
Boob tubers not so nifty over fifty. (Sorry, but it's Variety, I had to try.) The average TV viewer is now eligible for AARP. The primo demographics have migrated elsewhere, and a lot of ad revenue will go with them.
Who are those graying gazers? Crooked Timber isn't my usual hangout, but one of its contributors has run a nifty study on blogging and political participation and alignment. Well worth reading the whole thing, but what caught my attention was this graphic of 'ideological scaling' by media outlet. Seems that NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and PBS are all splitting the audience of aging liberals and lefties, while the sole outlet with the remaining right of center crowd is... guess who? Rupert Murdoch may have joined the AARP crowd long ago, but all of his brain cells are still working.
The inherent biases of the medium, rebuked. The ever valuable Strategy Page list came out with the following, embedded in an article that's otherwise about the progress in Iraq:
"Most people just take what the news gives them, but it’s becoming more popular to pursue other versions of events via the web. Checking the way [past] wars were reported at the time is one of them. But doing this makes you realize that you cannot trust the news to get it right for wars going on right now. That’s because the news has to report exciting “news” events in order to remain competitive (and profitable). Many people in the news business are constantly bitching about this, especially the entertainment techniques that often creep into the presentation of their reporting. But everyone realizes that the audience demands news that excites and entertains. News that simply informs, loses money and cannot survive, except on the web." (Emphasis mine.)
Given that the audience for that entertainment version of news is literally dying off, the survival and reinvention on the web is exactly what really counts for the long haul. I'm reminded of what has been one of my own touchstones for thinking about new media, Jerry Mander's 1970s work Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Mander was a McLuhen with actual experience in the medium, and you didn't have to share his politics to agree that it constrained and skewed its content, and was ultimately damaging to democratic discourse. (Reread that bit about news as entertainment.) It's a great pleasure to finally begin to see some of this harm remedied - by competition and not fiat. It's also high irony, considering Mander's leftism, that it's the liberal media that are the first butts of the joke. (Although Rupert might be well advised to sell high.)
The thousand cuts get deeper. Meanwhile, back in the dead tree media, the layoffs and cutbacks continue. Tribune is stripping itself of assets like its Chicago and Los Angeles real estate, Wrigley Field and the Cubs, to service the $13 billion debt it took on to go private. Apparently that's enough liquidation to cover it through 2008, but the scrapping will have to resume to survive in 2009. You've got to wonder: Real estate will bounce back eventually, and even the Cubbies might win the Series again, but it's hard to see how Tribune's core business survives in anything like its current shape and size. Meanwhile, loan covenant default may be approaching for smaller publishers such as Journal Register and MediaNews Group. I coincidentally picked up a copy of the Palo Alto Daily News freebie near my office yesterday, and found that it had eliminated its Monday edition and cut newsroom staff. (The PADN is a MediaNews Group pub.) Out of curiosity, I also grabbed another of the local freebies, and compared their coverage. Nearly every article was identical. No wonder, consider the following from the story above: "The paper's emphasis on local news changed. A recent edition contained only three locally bylined stories but more than two dozen wire service articles." If anyone's paying attention to Jeff Jarvis' ideas about 'hyperlocal' as the salvation of newspapers, they sure don't have influence at MediaNews. The PADN used to drive the big local San Jose Merc batty by stealing local advertisers. It didn't take MediaNews very long to destroy that.
The Blogfaddah - um - blogs. Glenn Reynolds comes out with an uncharacteristically lengthy post on the newspaper implosion, including some pithy reader interaction, wherein he's accused of displaying 'glee' about the industry's troubles. 'Glee' isn't really appropriate when an entire industry gets itself upside down. Anyone who grew up in the Midwest, as I did, has seen what that can do to ordinary people who have little control over the bad decisions and competitive landscape. The management and editorial staff responsible for turning their franchises into debilitated and biased mockeries are another matter. I find it pretty difficult to get worked up over the impending early retirement that awaits people like this. Mr. Saluto is welcome to have a 'humble' 4th of July; he's got a lot to be humble about. Myself, I plan on having one that's happy and free, and hope you do the same.
Update: Eric Raymond, who is blogging again, posts along similar lines. He gives the media's malfeasance on Iraq a more central place in their decline that I did.