Traditional media. I hear too little about the consequence of choices.
It makes me think of Lost Ones by Lauryn Hill:
Consequence is no coincidence
Hypocrites always wanna play innocent
Always want to take it to the full out extent
Always want to make it seem like good intent
Never want to face it when it’s time for punishment
I know you don’t wanna hear my opinion
But there come many paths and you must choose one
And if you don’t change then the rain soon come…
I feel like a traitor for even thinking this. Broadcast media was my mom’s career for thirty years. We grew up around producers, reporters, editors, writers…
But the worst kept secret in the world is that traditional media is failing.
After reading Frank Rich’s op-ed in the NYT, the causes seemed obvious:
- A catastrophic failure of professionalism during the last 8 years.
- A way too narrow reading of the tortoise and the hare fable.
Everyone has talked ad nauseam about the failure of professionalism, but the second cause still seems ripe.
Aesop’s lesson is always remembered as “slow and steady wins the race.” But the tortoise didn’t win the race because he was slow and steady. The tortoise won the race because the hare was cocky; so cocky, that his advantage was useless. If the hare had just run the stupid race, and spent less time mocking and teasing the tortoise, he would have kicked the tortoise’s shelled little ass.
It’s the same with the big media. If it had spent less time insisting that social media, blogs and the like were just immature fads, maybe less of its stalwarts would be headed for bankruptcy. Big media could’ve used its immense resources and familiarity with consumers to be ahead of the shift.
I get into fights about this rift with people a lot; people who think Twitter is entirely functionless, that blogs are nothing but exercises in vanity.
This blog is not about vanity; at least not any more than the novel I’m currently reading or the last album I bought. It’s all just creative expression. Creative expression is built for consumption; that’s the idea. If you’re only writing for yourself, you’d keep it in a journal under your bed. Why anyone who writes a blog is told of their vanity, while those who write 500 pages of non-fiction in verbose autobiographies are praised with spots on bestseller lists, frustrates me.
The willingness to pigeonhole us — bloggers, tweeters, etc. — comes with a price: irrelevance. This isn’t to say that any and all content produced for online consumption is the gold standard. It’s not. But we’ve easily passed the point where being self-published online is legitimate as an automatic disqualification. Actually, we’re approaching the point where not being published online is a death knell.
But I wrote all this on a blog. So I guess that means no one cares.
______
Just to be safe: it’s entirely possible that the cartoon was designed to be some remark about homelessness, but its use here is in no way intended to do the same.
i care! i do!
Sweet. Me, too.
I hear you loud and clear. And here’s something funny for you to think about. I was sick during the election. So sick that I couldn’t stay up to see if Obama won. So first thing in the morning, I checked http://www.rudecactus.com because I KNEW it would be on there. Seriously.
Access. We get it where we can now. Convenience is huge, especially if it’s convenient and reliable. And how many people were going to get the uncontested results of that election wrong? Right: none. So why not just find someone online to say that?
This is not exactly related to what you said, but … while I think it’s probably true that we write alone because we want to share our thoughts and feelings with an audience, that is not the same thing as writing FOR an audience. I write FOR myself: things I’m interested in and why. I write a blog because I want to share these things, but I don’t tailor what I write about to an audience.
Well, I try not to, anyway.
I fluctuate, but never steer from making sure it’s interesting to me. But writing for yourself isn’t vanity in the way “vanity” is used as a slur. Particularly self-involved blogging is no more vain than particularly self-involved albums by bands that love themselves a little too much.
There’s a big debate going on up here about our failing television networks. Quite frankly, I’m surprised they’ve lasted this long, for exactly the reasons you mention in this post. It’s like the cool kids turned up at the party four hours late and are now surprised that the nerdy kids decided to go ahead with their own kind of party.
I like that. The nerdy kids are actually keeping a VIP list at the door, now.
I think the death of traditional media outlets mirrors a lot of the other so-called ‘deaths’ we’ve seen in the past–the music and movie industries being the latest examples. There’s probably a thesis in this somewhere; the trend is to panic at first while the boat begins to sink. Eventually, though, someone comes to their senses and starts to adopt the new trends and, before you know it, iTunes is born and everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
Blogging has been around for ages, but it’s relevance is only just starting to be recognized. We’re the unsung heroes of new media, f.B. Even if that does sound a little vain.
There’s a lot of panicking because the ship is sinking. It’s a shame. They could’ve just built a better ship.
I do write for an audience a little. It includes my grandma, the guy who mentored me through my elementary school gifted and talented program, my brother who lives in Argentina and friends who live around the world, from Lesotho to Lakeville. I write for myself, too, because I love words and my career revolves around math.
My thoughts might be “irrelevant” to the world at large, but they’re very relevant to the world at small.
I just don’t think you have any need to worry about being relevant to the world at large. The number of people/organizations who create for audiences of all sizes is just so vast.
(Of course, I’m also carried by a blog syndication service and picked up by newspapers. Oxymoronic, huh?)
Maybe. Or maybe just layered.
“The willingness to pigeonhole us — bloggers, tweeters, etc. — comes with a price: irrelevance.”
This post is really well written and so appropriate. And I love the Aesop lesson.
Thanks. That damn hare. He was just lazy and uninspired.
“I get into fights about this rift with people a lot; people who think Twitter is entirely functionless, that blogs are nothing but exercises in vanity.”
I’ve been thinking about these thoughts for awhile- in fact I wanted to write a post about how I think all bloggers are vain. Of course writing that on my own blog would not help and I would probably piss off the blogopshere- probably why I never wrote it…
Traditional media is certainly in a crisis, something I’ve thought about a lot as well and I’m glad to hear your thoughts on it too.
all bloggers are vain
The reason people might get upset is because of the connotation, the implication attached to “vain.” It’s not something we generally aspire to be. It’s a character blemish.
All I’m saying is that in the right context, it seems obvious that the overwhelming majority of consumed creative expression could be considered vain. And that means that the vanity in blogging is then not worth the emphasis it gets.
Dude. I couldn’t even read the rest of the post because I got SO lost in singing Lost Ones in my head.
That album will forever and always remain in my top 5. EVER.
So good, right? Classic.
Ok. Now that I’ve read it through I have to say I agree WHOLEheartedly and yet again you have cemented in my head exactly why I love your blog so much.
Flattery. I’m going to keep working hard to earn it. Thanks.
I’m with Olga. The fact that online publications are starting to hire bloggers makes me happy. Nothing like validation from the naysayers.
I still pay attention to traditional media, but it’s usually to flesh out something that I read earlier on a blog. Interesting to see where things will actually go.
I don’t want traditional media to go anywhere. It’s built by professionals. I just want the issue to be what big media can do to rescussitate itself and not complaining about blogs like they’re incessant gnats.
Uhg! Look at the big newspapers tumbling over themselves to defend their decision to never change or grow or embrace the way their customers were moving. Well, the defense is useless as they all declare bankruptcy.
You hit the nail on the head with “arrogance”
“We’re an institution! We can never fail.”
They’re right. Fail? No. EPIC FAIL? Yes.
EPIC. It’s heartbreaking to watch institutions fall to pieces. All the jobs…
Best example I can think of is ThePrintedBlog (www.theprintedblog). Here’s a great excerpt:
“Tuesday, January 27th, 2009: 5:00am. It’s 4 degrees without the wind chill. Joshua Karp, six unpaid interns, and a camera crew race between three CTA stations, handing out the very first issue of The Printed Blog, a brand new print newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and online, user-generated content. In the midst of the meltdown of the newspaper industry, this small, completely bootstrapped team, has successfully launched a new print newspaper. A few days later, Time Out Chicago asks, “Is he crazy?”
Later named one of American’s Most Promising Startups by BusinessWeek, The Printed Blog redefined the print industry and the nature of journalism by actually launching a newspaper based on a completely new business model. Going from idea, to launch, to internationally
recognized newspaper brand in less than three months, The Printed Blog now publishes nearly 7,000 weekly papers in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and in four different communities in Chicago (Wicker Park, Lakeview, Loop, and Gold Coast Editions). In March, 2009, Editor & Publisher magazine asked its readers to consider: “Is this really the future of newspapers?””
via: http://blog.theprintedblog.com/?p=336
I don’t want The Printed Blog to become the future. I don’t want professional news to be amatuerized. I want professional news to be diversified, to be more versatile.
Interesting topic and interesting take.
First (most important thing) I want to say: I LOVED the Bugs Bunny version of the tortoise and the hare where there are ~50 rabbits instead of one. LOVED it!
Okay, moving on:
The ‘long-tail’ approach is certainly where we’re at and it has its plusses and minuses. I enjoy getting very specific content that I select via blogs. And, to be honest, most of my news now comes from this source, too.
BUT, there is a tremendous amount of garbage on the blogosphere. The wheat to chaff ratio sucks. I’d love to have some “editor” level function incorporated somehow to A) keep me from having to look through a lot of dreck and B) (selfishly) to tell me when my post is garbage or misspelled or that none of it EVER makes the cut.
So the ‘vanity’ label I interpret as in ‘vanity press’. There’s no vetting process beyond your own. I say this is sometimes good, sometimes bad.
The other thing to keep in mind is the affect of bloggers on the economy. A) Marketing people are now using blogs to influence. Heck, I’m using my blog to influence regarding certain products/companies/restaurants/etc. B) Because of blogging, which is done free, quality writing has been devalued. The market is saturated and you can’t get paid to write. Again, some good, some bad.
I agree almost entirely. I want professional journalism. When I look for info online, I go to the news organizations’ sites, not blogs. But that’s not because blogs are vain. It’s because journalists know what they’re doing (at least they’re supposed to). I don’t want us to change our sources for news. I just want traditional sources to be lighter on their feet. There has to be a way to do that and keep business going. There just has to.
Maybe it means telecommuting. Why does the NYT need a large office building? Send the reporters out, do everything remotely, other than the editing (which has come a along way but probably still needs some centralization). That cuts down a ton of operational overhead. Buy everyone laptops, rather than desks, chairs and stupid wall hangings. Hell, the environment would love the reduction in commuting, too.
Methinks they need to remake Revenge of the Nerds…
BLOGGER STYLE.
And by “remake,” you mean “include us,” right?