On The Media

I noticed that the piece had 3 parties:

the 'producers', (the networks,)

the writers and

the ad buyers.

Unfortunately you forgot the main and the most important segment: The audience.

The audience is the one being poorly served by all of these.

I wouldn't be surprised if the writers, who want to write and get paid for it, and the advertisers, who are searching for their audience, switched to podcasting and other 'time shifting,' 'location shifting' media in an effort to get around the barrier put up by the 'producers'.

The 'producers' by virtue of their position in the process control all of the money, generated for them by the writers, et alia, and paid for by the advertisers (who are paying through the nose are just trying to find the audience.)

Once the advertisers realize that they don't have to put up with vague guess-timates about nebulous market shares but instead can get real figures about delivered content to audience members who requested it, I think the television industry is in real trouble.

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There are aspects about our media industries which the audience has grown to loathe: mainly shows which are put out there because they are cheaper to produce (Why did a show get canceled despite critical or popular acclaim? It cost too much!) but not outright bad enough to get the audience to switch the station.

I look forward to 2009 when the TV does the mandated switch to digital and a great many screens go dark, never to light up again with a surfeit of unreal reality shows.

That will be because the audience, which you shamefully omitted to include in you piece, will have started to get their content (and their ads,) from OTHER sources.

The face of advertising will have changed from paying for CPM guess-timates and nebulous market share to getting actual counts of delivered content, regardless of whether its print, audio or video, and they'll be able to engage in an actual relationship with an interested potential consumer.

That's the power of using the internet properly.

I remember hearing others say that there was no way they were ever going to watch baseball again after the players strike some time ago. That feeling didn't last.

Broadcast TV is easy. If I've seen everything on the DVR, I will surf and be satisfied with watching nothing in particular. The writers strike is a minor annoyance, but we'll forget and little will change in the end.

We used to sit around the hearth and watch the flames and that was easier still than inventing boxes with sounds and moving images of little people and, finally, making the boxes flat and the size of a wall of the home that we hadn't invented when we sat around that hearth.

I see that Bill Moyer and Bill Buckley aren't the only smug ones out here in cyberspace.

I tend to think Bob may have a point about the collapse of the television industry. Video killed the radio star. What is next, American Idle?

Radio is dead! That's quite ironic given what we're engaged in right now and why. Radio is an industry transformed, perhaps stronger than ever, thanks to the internet. A recent report on NPR demonstrated how the technology exists for individuals to host their own call-in shows via the internet; live with unlimited callers. Hardly dead.

Television will likely be transformed, but it's collapse is remote.

I think this video offers a nice perspective on the writer's side of the strike:

Why We Fight

http://youtube.com/watch?v=oJ55Ir2jCxk

Until I saw this, I thought of the writers as being selfish.

Jack, that was a song title from the advent of MTV. You know, back before right wing nut jobs filled the evolutionary niche left in its wake.

Now satellite radio has brought a whoe (oops!) new universe of programming into being. And, as you point out, the Internet is revolutionizing all our media. (Though, weren't you slamming it a few weeks back?)

Chris, you have a point, I'm just not sure what it is.

I love the internet and bloggers; the new journalists. But relying on random posts to the FCC's website to support your "big media conglomerates are the enemy" opinion is just absurd.

I'm still waiting for some glimmer of evidence.

Jack, you keep on insisting on framing my arguments with your imprecise paraphrasing of my statements. I never called them "the enemy".

As my original post on the subject pointed to, in answer to your complaint that local news was a waste of time, according to a Bill Moyers show on the subject of increased consolidation of media ownership, officials in a midwestern community hoped to use broadcast radio to warn residents of an impending twister and found that the media conglomerates had so sown up the market with either automated or national feed stations that they could find none that had on air personnel to spread the warning. (If you want the specific community or communities, I am sorry but the persistence of my memory is not quite so expansive.)

I would not be surprised if that same scenario was repeated again yesterday during the severe weather.

Local news is important and I believe its quantity and quality is demonstrably diminished by the sort of broadcasting or publishing that the Clear Channels and Newscorps provide. Because of that influence, there is some truth to your complaint, but not because local news is, in itself, a waste of time.

Anytime you see a report on Paris Hilton, Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan on the news on local television that is a news hole that would have been filled with actual local news reporting 20 years ago.

The situation to which Chris Gray refers "officials in a midwestern community hoped to use broadcast radio to warn residents of an impending twister and found that the media conglomerates had so sown up the market with either automated or national feed stations that they could find none that had on air personnel to spread the warning" is an urban legend.

The station in question is staffed 24/7.

Here's the site debunking the myth:

http://wotmedia.blogspot.com/2005/06/demythification-urban-legend-of-clear.html

There went my shred.

Now, the tide is turning and the big media conglomerates can feel it and respond with more progressive programming, pretending that they didn’t squelch it all along, but they let down their public trust as licensees to insure those emergency communications and, thus, failed Minot.

This is what those licenses were for, not for the most popular programming, the most informing, at least in an emergency. They can blame it on the poor town officials, now, but who has more resources, Minot or Clear Channel?

They were, essentially, asleep at the stick.