  Industries that cannot or will
not adapt to changing customer needs die. That has been the case since
our economy began. Public opinion about the trustworthiness of the
media and their ability to meet customers' needs is abysmally low (only
tax collection authorities rank lower). The number of customers of
newspapers, radio and television, and the amount of time those
customers are willing to invest reading, listening to, and watching the
media, is in long-term decline. So are the number of customers of the
so-called 'entertainment media', though the companies hide the decline
by reporting revenues instead of units sold. Oligopolies control
substantial amounts of many of the information and entertainment media,
and each year they are reducing the amount they produce (fewer
articles, fewer new titles) and becoming more and more dependent on a
few 'blockbuster' entertainment releases and on inexpensive freelanced
or shared information sources for their economic survival. Meanwhile
the number and popularity of independent producers of both information
and entertainment are soaring, filling the gap left by the retreating
mainstream companies.
Perhaps because some of the media oligopolies are in both the
information and entertainment media, many of them seem to be unaware of
the fact that the function of these two types of media are completely
different. The purpose of the information media is to provide actionable information.
The purpose of the entertainment media is to provoke emotion.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the National Review are
in the information business. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, CNN, Jon
Stewart, lots of editorial columnists, and Fox 'News' are in the
entertainment business -- they are satirists ("artists using sarcasm,
derision and wit"), out to provoke you, not to inform you. Different objectives, different
audiences. Many young people may rely on Jon or Rush as
their main source of 'news information', but that 'information' is
sterile -- it does not form or 'inform' their actions, even though it
might well influence their beliefs. Even the antiwar music of the 1960s
was emotional preaching to the converted, and though it led to an
important action -- the end of the Vietnam War -- it was not the music that informed
us of the need for that action.
So let's look at them separately, starting with the information media.
As I explained
recently, a small majority of Americans, and a growing number
of young people in other affluent nations, are essentially disengaged
from the political processes in their countries. My reading of their
beliefs is that they don't believe anything they do will make any
substantial difference in the world, so to them, there is no actionable
information. They are lost forever to the information
media. They'll watch CNN if there are interesting car chases, bomb
explosions, celebrity scandals or tracer pyrotechnics to entertain
them, for the same reason they will switch to The Simpsons if there
aren't. So we have a steadily dwindling market for information media --
the 'news' sections of some newspapers, and some news and public
affairs programming on some radio and television networks, are fighting
over fewer and fewer customers. A lot of them have chucked it in and
migrated their information programming to entertainment programming,
calling the new segments 'human interest' or 'lifestyle' stories. Some
days you can read USA Today or watch a 'public affairs' program and not
find any actionable information in it whatsoever -- the market for
entertainment seems to be larger, more durable and less expensive. But
this is a losing proposition -- these programs can't hope to compete
for the entertainment audience with programs that pander purely to
provoking emotion, like all the so-called 'reality' TV programs, or
video games.
So what about the independent media, including blogs? They, too, have
two distinct audiences. The New Technology indymedia and blogs provide
some useful, actionable information for people in technology
businesses. But a lot of them also focus on tech toys and tools that
enable technologies to be used substantially for entertainment.
Likewise some political indymedia and blogs provide information not
available anywhere else (principally local information),
and some useful analysis that may suggest the need for some specific
political action (again, usually at the local level). But a lot of them
are echo chambers, preaching to the converted with little more useful
information content than one of Dylan's 1960s protest songs. As I
mentioned in my Saturday post, their purpose seems largely to be to
provide emotional reassurance
that you, the disenfranchised, disgruntled, outraged minority, are not
alone, and are justified in your outrage. And that makes them
entertainment media -- fun, satisfying, but not really informative in
any actionable way. I read a lot of progressive blogs, and I enjoy
them, but most of them are short on useful ideas and new information
you can act on.
Ten years ago I addressed a conference of Canadian information media
representatives and told them that, if they wanted to rebuild an
audience, and become more profitable, they would need to start
providing more actionable information, and more analysis of information
that would tell readers what they should do about the information they
were reading. I told them that actionable information is usually local
(e.g. Wal-Mart proposing to rezone parkland in your community for a
distribution centre). I told them people would probably pay for
analysis that could lead to constructive action that would make
communities and people's lives better. I told them that no one would
pay them much longer to edit and reprint stuff from newswires, and that
printed classified ads would probably be extinct in a generation. They
chided me for my "doom and gloom" predictions for their industry. Perhaps if I repeated my
remarks today they would listen.
The information media, if they are to survive at all, need to:
- Provide only
actionable
information and actionable
analysis to customers, being very specific about what
actions can (and should, if they are editorializing) be taken by the
individual reader/listener/viewer.
- Facilitate organization
of those actions, using their online resources.
- Enter into partnerships with
their customers, to assess what information those customers need, and
to involve the customers in the collection and analysis of that information (the
media cannot afford to, and need not, take all or even most of the
responsibility for research and observation -- there are millions of
people with cameras and instruments who can help them collect it, and will help if it
will help them take needed action). We are, today, all journalists.
I am dubious that the legacy media will be able or willing to make this
adaptation to survive. Today they collect and pontificate, tomorrow
they must analyze, partner, facilitate and organize. It's a very
different skill set. I think it is more likely that the newspapers,
radio and television will decide that there is little profit in
information media, and they will (with a few exceptions) either migrate
to all-entertainment formats (some of them are already there) or fold.
The indymedia and bloggers have a better chance of succeeding in this
role, but I would say the odds are not good. They (we)
are very
disorganized, overly enamoured of our own personal and collective
points of view, too lazy, busy or cowardly to become truly
investigative
journalists, and lack good research and facilitation skills. We are too
inclined (when we become popular) to mimic the failed example of the
legacy media, too addicted to the daily ego-gratification from our
small 'audiences' to get away from the computer and do some
of the real, in-the-trenches, thankless, time-consuming fact-finding
and organizing work that could really
change things. We find it too comfortable to re-report, rather
than doing original reporting. And we would find it humbling to have to
focus attention, at least at first, on small, local, messy issues
instead of presuming to add valuable analysis from our armchairs to the
global issues of the day.
It is possible, however. We are acquiring skills, and those with whom
we could network online have the remaining skills we would need to pull
this off. Imagine if every bribe of a local politician, every local
incidence of pollution, every corporate decision that would have an
impact on a community, every attempt to hush up a local scandal, every
rezoning application, were being scrutinized, investigated, analyzed,
publicized, critiqued by thousands of networked 'journalists' in every
community, and publicized to everyone in that community. And once those
local journalist networks have cut their teeth on local issues, imagine
if they started banding together to do the same work, with eyes and
ears everywhere, drawing on thousands of now-trained, relentless
volunteer activist journalists, to dig into state, national and global
issues, and showing and telling the world what was really going on.
If we're lucky, that's the future of the information media. No profit
in it, most likely, but enormous personal satisfaction, grass-roots
empowerment, and real impact.
I see the entertainment media as engaging in a race to the bottom. Once
we have movies that are so violent and disgusting that people start to
find them offensive and exploitative rather than 'thrilling', once we
have dumbed down the oligopoly music 'product' to pretty,
choreographed, all-sound-alike resampled nursery rhyme chanters, once
TV starts showing live executions instead of just people prostituting
themselves eating worms for cash, we will run out of ways to shock and
manipulate people into watching or listening to crap. I figure that
will take another ten years. By that time, I suspect, real reality lovers
will be able to tune into any of millions of tiny, hidden cameras over
the Internet and watch anything from live sex to street fights to
emergency ward admissions to celebrities' bathrooms. Why watch phony scripted 'reality'
when you can watch the real thing, in real time, and chat with millions
of others watching in?
During this time, independent entertainment will continue to flourish,
and with the Internet it will be able to evolve a market for virtually
every taste. It will learn to be better at entertainment, it will, in
ways the mainstream entertainment media have never been able to do,
find and connect with and respond to the needs of its audiences (some
independent artists are already accepting 'commissions' for
personalized compositions). This is the real entertainment
marketplace (as Jon Husband says, "a true market is a two-way
conversation"), and it will flourish because every one of its millions
of independent songs, videos, games, films, programs, and works of art
will be a learning experience that everyone will share and build on.
And most importantly, a certain proportion of the work of each artist
will be available free, commercial-free and on demand, delivering a
knockout punch to the mainstream entertainment media who still see the
flow as product-down, cash-up, with the producer in control of the
transaction.
What will transform this more than anything else will be the facility
for high-quality online collaboration. Millions of musicians and
writers and film-makers will instantly be able to find like-minded
talent to work with, and be able to produce new works asynchronously.
And if you like parts of a song or film you may be able to disaggregate
it, keep the parts you like, and create your own compositions on that
foundation. With the evolution of animation, you might even be able to
produce your own drama or comedy production with invented, realistic
characters of your own creation.
With all this technology power in your hands, entertainment could once
again become something that people do for themselves. And with the
skills we will be able to acquire, and the power of networks, this could
allow spontaneous, community-based entertainment to flourish again.
These two media evolutions could have something more in common than
being grassroots and networked -- they will both allow us to contribute
our time
instead of our money
to meet, collaboratively, our information and entertainment needs.
Throwing a ton of money at them has not resulted in development of
better information or entertainment products -- in fact there's lots of
evidence that big budgets and preoccupation with profit has made the
products much worse.
You hear a lot, from all over the political and moral spectrum, about
the need to 'take back the media'. Maybe it isn't the media that we
need to take back, as much as the work that the media has failed so
utterly to do for us. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
