(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...I don’t know who wrote this painfully-defensive editorial on the LA Times, but he doth protest loudly and irrationally that he unintentionally put another nail in the MSM coffin and put the mainstream media doomsday clock at five-minutes to midnight. Very sad; no, rather pathetic… Via USC Annenberg School for Communication’s Online Journalism Review
“The essence of good journalism is asking the right questions. Google, however, won’t ask anything of those who submit comments. According to the company’s announcement, its only interest is that the submissions are authentic, not that they’re relevant or even truthful. As a result, the comments section is likely to be larded with spin, hype and obfuscation. A seemingly heartfelt comment may carry the CEO’s name, but the words will probably have been typed by corporate flacks.”
“There will be some valuable responses too, plugging holes in stories or correcting mistaken impressions. Google, however, won’t help readers separate the factual wheat from the public-relations chaff — a reminder that Google may strive to be the world’s index, but it’s not journalism.”
Those poor journalists and reporters said the same thing about popular papers, tabloids, the radio, television, and now the Internet. Same shit, different decade.
So, how indignant is he going to get when he finds himself or herself put out to pasture out of irrelevance.
What happens to professors, reporters, priests, rabbis, and experts when people cease to ask their opinion?
When a quick Google search and a Wikipedia look-see offers better, quicker, and more satisfying results than anywhere else?
Here is the panacea: professors, reporters, priests, rabbis, and experts actually need to start adding value. They need to earn their keep. They need to attract a readership, they need to learn to communicate more completely. These experts can no longer rely on their affiliation or their degrees to bolster their relevance and importance.
Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Rushkoff, Malcom Gladwell, and Stephen Hawking are all media darlings because, although they deserved to be completely entitled, they didn’t act that way. They wrote accessible books for regular folks.
Stop complaining and start performing and competing. Your industry, expertise, has become privatized, and you really need to compete with everyone else, even Pink is the New Blog.
Sorry mate.
Filed under: Mainstream Media, Old Media, Traditional Media
Loading ...
oh…this is very interesting. i’d like to play devil’s advocate here, but i really can’t, i agree. the argument does get flimsy in the academia area, as *most* institutions have strict measures in place to ensure accuracy, and blah, blah, blah, but yeah…blah, blah, blah is what i think the public is starting to think. there is an increasing tolerance for unverified information.
Yes, academic institutions do have strict measures and in the worlds of medicine, science, technology, etc, this is important vertically, but to most consumers, it is hideously boring. The winner in terms of effecting messaging for content and for popularity is accessibility, attractiveness, and availability, not accuracy. It needs to make sense even more than it has to make truth.
[…] Comments Abraham Harrison on Mainstream Media is Scared Senselessjanna on Mainstream Media is Scared SenselessAbraham Harrison on Earned Traffic is Superior to […]
i disagree that truth is less valued. both are required. my point is that we are becoming a more trustworthy public with regards to the truth. another thing to throw in the pot is that myriad reports have been published by academics that have turned out to be less than accurate. however, academia’s stance on this outcomes is that this information is a “building block” to further discovery as opposed to just being plain wrong. anyway, i digress…
The truth is less valued even if the truth has never been more valuable.
The media, the government, science, and the academy did it to themselves.
People just don’t trust these people any more. They go to citizen-generated-media because they really feel like “the man” is feeding them lots of shit: propaganda, lies, and so forth.
They’re going around MSM because there has been a terrible loss in their prestige.
The government is even worse.
I can definitely say that reading blogs over mainstream media is something I have been getting into more frequently. Getting information directly from the source (which is hard to find, but with some prodding it can be done), is something I find much more worthwhile than subjecting oneself to some FOX News writers one sided bullshit.
The odd thing about all of this is that I think that the LA Times has a legitimate point…if they held themselves up to their own standards. Their failure to do so and the arrogance they display shows that they’re more self-righteous overly defensive holdouts.
Tangering Toad had been writing about how ‘professional’ movie reviewers seemingly review movies from their own perpsective and not the target audiences. Essentially he takes them to task for evaluating children’s movies such as Ratatouille and Underdog. The critics loved the former and panned the latter. Kids aren’t thrilled with the former and love the latter.
Here (http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.com/2007/08/your-taste-or-your-customers-childrens.html) he talks about the mentaliy of the critics who loved Ratatouille:
“The most telling scene in the movie is one where the forces of good take back a 5-star gourmet restaurant from the forces of evil, who have put out a line of frozen burritos and frozen pizzas under the name of the famous chef who started the restauant (e.g. a little Wolfgang Puck joke for the more urbane adults in the audience.) And to celebrate, the forces of good make a bonfire of the frozen entrees. Now in the theater I was in, the kids were completely baffled as to why anyone would consider the destruction of frozen pizza to be a good and noble thing. I mean frozen pizza is one of the foods your average 10 year old lives on. Destroying it just seems… wrong.”
He later explains the problem in another post (http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.com/2007/08/poor-virginia-heffernan.html):
“So rather than an thoughtful explanation of why a 9 year-old might be enthralled with the production, we get a long-winded explanation of why a childless 30something hipstress is not.”
This is a perfect example of why the LA Times shows they have no clue.
He also goes after the NYTimes critic Virginia Heffernan who gave a somewhat negative review of
I am not much of a blog reader with the exception of “Go Fug Yourself” and of course, anything that Chris Abraham writes. So entertaining! Uh-oh. Maybe that’s the problem. We want to be entertained more than being informed. Hmmm…well, Chris Abraham does inform, but in an entertaining manner.
On a another note, most of the students I work with do not know how to conduct research other than through Google. When I was in graduate school last year, the librarian gave hour long tutorials on how to use the library (of which, I was a happy and grateful recipient). Granted, most of the research is accessed electronically, and definitely not on Google. The information is found on very, very expensive databases (up to $1,000-$2,000 a year for access to each database). This makes the best knowledge (or is it the best?) very challenging to access.
Thanks Janna! (Full disclosure: Abraham Harrison has invested in Janna’s rock star tutoring company, so maybe she is biased ;))
Yes, the problem with elite media outlets is that they’re fighting like crazy to keep IP out of the “commodity” categorization.
Sorry, that’s were it is all going: commoditization.
Screw the RIAA, screw the publishing industry, and screw LexisNexis.
Since the WSJ, the NYTs, LexisNexis, movies, TV, video, music, and everything else is a quick Bittorrent download away, and since all articles are in direct competition with “The Cult of the Amateur,” even the graduates of Yale College, HBS, and anywhere else need to actually be smart, aggressive, competitive, and creative in order to make any progress as a professional or as a businessman.
I am a commodity and I am proud. All I offer is a service, pure and simple. All I have is thoughts and time and all I have going for me is being super curious and very good at pattern-recognition…
Otherwise, I am chattel, just like the rest of us.
I hope all the folks who feel entitled to their lives fall flat on their faces.
Fight the power and may the elite choke on their foie gras!