BuzzMachine

The troubles hitting big media are hardly restricted to the U.S. In France, media mogul Arnaud Lagadère warns, “The press has ten years left. Production costs will become unsustainable.” Editors Weblog quotes him saying that the the press has “little future in its present state” and that “we’re moving towards the dismantling of its traditional support structure.” I’m hoping that this quote lost something in the translation, because I sure can’t figure out what he’s saying:

As for new media, Lagadère said that “Our adaptation will not consist of making a systematic and mechanic transfer of our press to the Internet. That would be a mistake. Our advantage will remain in the richness of our content. We will not submit to the mutation of modes of consumption; on the other hand we will play a part in their evolution.”

In light of the Knight Ridder and Tribune fiascos, I have to laugh at all the mewling about big, bad, media consolidation. The mewlers needn’t waste their breathy angst on media companies getting bigger. The big ones are toppling of their own weight, weighed down by their heritage, habits, and huge costs. Others are forced to open up — see the networks taking their shows to the internet. The irony of the parallel falls of the Tribune and Knight empires is that regulation against consolidation is what stopped Knight from diversifying, at least within media, and finding efficiencies with media cross-ownership within its markets. But the fact that Tribune was grandfathered in, owning one of every medium in Chicago, wasn’t enough to save it.

To those who celebrate that some newspapers will be freed from the yoke of remote corporate parents as they are bought up by local egotists, beware: New cash from would-be moguls and kingmakers in local markets will only stave off the inevitable. To those who want to regulate big media into extinction: Relax. They will die of their own weight.

: SEE ALSO: Jack Shafer, who says that trading the big, bad media conglomerate for the local mogul is not such an enticing prospect.

Everybody’s still avoiding the real necessity: restructing the news industry and its products and services. More later.

Catching up with Reuters Media President Chris Ahearn’s explanation of the wire’s $100k contribution to NewAssignment.net:

While encouraging good journalistic ideas is a worthy goal in itself, Reuters believes that supporting new and varied networks of creators with different perspectives is good for both journalism and business.

Ultimately, journalism is about the story and the pursuit of truth; it is not about the news industry, a j-school or a traditional newsroom structure. By building bridges and finding new ways to augment and accelerate the creation of quality journalism, we believe that ultimately the public will benefit and perhaps change their minds about the noble profession of journalism.

This on top of Reuters’ deal with Global Voices. Bravo.

It was bound to happen; I’m just surprised the odds didn’t hit first in one of the many American reality shows or double-dare-you movies. First, the crocodile hunter is hunted. Now a BBC presenter suffers serious brain injuries in the crash of a jet-powered car he was driving for a show.

Post writer John Mainelli gets bounced. Langford bags one.

: LATER: Link fixed now. I am proud to say that I used my Treo to blog this from a church meeting. No lightning.

Howard 100 News bulldog Steve Langford gave the New York Post a beautiful journalism lesson this morning. A few days ago, media writer John Mainelli wrote a piece speculating on spurious rumors that Howard Stern was going to leave satellite for earth again. Stern has spent the last few days tearing apart every falsehood in the story. It was an attack on Stern, pure and simple and Stern says it’s no coincidence that it is timed to the convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (poor guys) in Texas. So the intrepid Langford got Mainelli on the phone — he has been too chicken to talk to Stern on the air — and pressed him on the fact that he is a radio consultant himself advising terrestrial radio stations and he does not disclose that in his reporting. Mainelli said he has no New York clients anymore. So what? Stern and Sirius are national. It is a conflict of interest, especially because it is not disclosed. Langford Mainelli also got threatening with Langford, which was good for a laugh. Langford earns the A. Mainelli fails the assignment.

Pardon me for being unimpressed with Current.tv’s new outpost on Yahoo. They’re still not getting the internet. Worse, they’re dissing the internet. And that’s troubling from a content, interactivity, or business perspective. But it’s also puzzling from a political perspective.

The network still does not share its best stuff — or what it thinks is best — with the internet because they’re still afraid of pissing off cable companies, which still aren’t picking up Current in volume. Note that other networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox — are no longer scared of pissing off their channels of distribution. But Current’s business model is predicated on getting cable carriage. I still say they should have built the first big, funded, citizen-created internet TV network. But they didn’t. They could have used Yahoo to get attention for what they put on the “air.” But they didn’t.

The network also remains quite controlling. They create videos that try hard to look and sound just like bad 7 p.m. syndicated unnews shows. They have uninformative but still costly travel pieces sucking up to Dubai … and then teasing a story next week on the sad lives of prostitutes there; they haven’t found their place on the flullometer. Oh, yes, they show videos created by the people. But they put those videos through a process of selection, a gauntlet the citizens have to run — still — before they are heard. Since Current started, YouTube obsoleted that model; the people no longer need to guys with the cables and antennas to be heard. But Current doesn’t see that. Current could have made Yahoo an opportunity to create an open network of the videos of the people. But they didn’t.

What they did do is create a small and uncompelling collection of videos — a few made by them, a few made by others — about things like driving and flying. Why? Because there are ad dollars there (well, in the case of automotive, there aren’t as many ad dollars from automotive as they may have thought). Making money is fine. But when I saw a button called “action” on Yahoo’s Current, I thought it might be about taking action in the country and the goverment. No, it’s about going fast. Odd, considering how going fast on the ground or above does have an impact on global warming.

Al Gore, inventor of Current and the internet, has been dissing the latter lately. He respects broadcast to the masses more than conversation with the niches. That’s the old way to look at the world in both media and political terms. I’m surprised he hasn’t updated that view and started living it. He also has created venues that are closed, controlled at the center, not generous at the edges. That, too, is the old way of media and politics. So what does this say about Gore the politician these days? I’d say it makes him look out-of-date, not so current.

Jay Rosen announces that Reuters has generously donated $100,000 to NewAssignment.net, which will enable it to hire an editor.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury speaks out against Islamic violence:

Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.” . . .

Lord Carey went on to argue that a “deep-seated Westophobia” has developed in recent years in the Muslim world. . . .

He said he agreed with his Muslim friends who claimed that true Islam is not a violent religion, but he wanted to know why Islam today had become associated with violence. “The Muslim world must address this matter with great urgency,” he said.

Yahoo announced disappointing ad revenue growth for automotive and financial services today, kicking its stock in the groin.

This comes as Yahoo also announces a big and expensive marketing push: Dunkin’ Donuts for all.

I’ll say it again: Yahoo is the last old-media company. It is dependent on the same dynamics — good and bad — as other media companies: the high value but difficulties of direct sales to agencies; the cost of acquiring users; the vulnerability to larger market trends; the high cost of owning content.

Google, on the other hand, just rides atop the waves, wherever they go. So far, at least, it does not tie itself to the old models of owning (or licensing) content or getting value only out of bringing people to its site.

The successful media companies of the new age will be the ones that enable media wherever it wants to be.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism created a roundtable-via-email about online and the future of news. That’s here. My answers were cut short, which is fine, except what was excised was my complaint about the questions; I argued that they were bringing the old-media worldview to the new-media world. So they linked to my full answers and so will I. A few examples from the cutting-room floor:

Question: Blog readership seems to have stalled in 2005. Content analysis also shows there is little of what we most would think of as original reporting in blogs. Yet they often write about events outside the purview of the mainstream press. How ultimately do you think blogs and other citizen media will affect news reporting in America? Will we ever see them as a more significant, or even equally important part of the mainstream American news diet as traditional journalism?

Reply: Your questions are fairly dripping with agenda. You seem to be trying to push a worldview that says that blogs and online video are on the decline – so pay no mind to them – and that what journalism needs is more staff. Sorry, but that attitude is what is putting American journalism in peril. Head, meet sand. . . .

You – like so many journalism conferences these days – make the mistake of trying to turn this discussion into a cable news shoutfest: blogs vs. mainstream media! Enough! The right question to ask is how blogs and mainstream media can work together to improve journalism and an informed society. You should be asking how any mainstream journalist could possibly imagine not doing his or her job without the help of the public through blogs. . . .

Question: Do you think the economic model of the Internet has to shift from an advertising based model to something else for traditional journalism to survive at a level that we have become accustomed to? If so, do you have any thoughts on what that new model might be?

Reply: And why is the standard the “level that we have become accustomed to”? I’m sorry to be such a curmudgeon about the curmudgeonly art of journalism, but that is precisely the attitude that, I believe, could be the death of our beloved craft. Your words presume an agenda of trying to preserve a past rather than trying to imagine a future. . . .

Much more and less pissy comment from Media Bloggers’ Bob Cox, Dan Gillmore, Jay Hamilton of Duke University, and Lee Rainie of Pew.

David Carr imagines Time Warner without Time Inc. The old magazines are a drag on corporate performance. They have not managed to start new successes. They’ve started selling off their lesser titles. Can a sale of the publishing division be next? Sure, it can. Did it need to be this way? No, it didn’t. But Time Inc., like other magazine companies, never managed to figure out the internet. Oh, they tried. Who can forget — try as they might —
Pathfinder?

Magazines could have had a unique benefit in the internet if they had thought of themselves not as slick paper but instead of networks of interest and information. The New Yorker is a good illustration: David Remnick et al pick good shit. People like the shit they pick. So they gather around and subscribe. That was as far as the relationship could go in years past. But The New Yorker is more than its content. It is truly a community of smart people, a wise and select crowd, who all like the same shit. And all those people could join in and contribute to the community. Wouldn’t you like to know the books that New Yorker readers are reading? Wouldn’t you be eager to have them recommend articles they’ve read elsewhere? Wouldn’t you enjoy contributing yourself to that exchange? I would. And would this make my relationship with the magazine, its brand, its value, and its community stronger? Yes, it would.

I ran into a few smart magazine executives I respect last week and they are frustrated that magazine brands don’t have greater presences online because they want to build stronger relationships, which will yield better business. Sadly, not many in the business view it this way. They’re still thinking content and control. They’re still thinking centralized. Break out and think distributed and think community and new things become possible.

Newsmagazines are particularly screwed in a world of commodity news (who needs one-size-fits-all Time to give you the news — late — when you have friends to point you to what you really care about?). But even they could have become more than just repositories of content their own staffs created but instead gateways to what larger worlds know.

The strength of these brands is that they had — note the tense — a headstart. They could have used their promotional clout and reputations to enable these communities to form around them. But they didn’t. Too late? Maybe.