Tapsearch Com EditorHow the MSM could have saved itself
March 2nd 2007 00:46
An interesting idea from an ABC News writer:
"If newspapers could do it over again, they should have sold off their physical assets, hired more reporters, editors and freelancers at a lower initial salary, opened more news bureaus around the world (if only in the form of solitary stringers working out of their apartments) instead of shutting them down, and demanded more hard news reporting from their reporters and a lot less editorializing and analysis.
"If that sounds counterintuitive, so is the entire history of high tech. Every time a threatened industry has tried to survive by adopting the new paradigm it has failed. The only solution is to come up with an even newer paradigm of your own."
This actually isn't as counterintuitive as it sounds. The blogosphere is killing the MSM not for its reporting but for its analysis -- as you'll see even on this blog, most posts start with a link to an MSM source.
Take, for a major example, the Dan Rather fake document scandal. Rather's team did all the reporting, messed it up, and the bloggers (who have a wide range of skills and expertise) caught the problem.
Bloggers, excepting the best, very rarely make phone calls or do research beyond Google searches. Most have full-time jobs of their own, so they're not going out and covering stuff. Maybe it's not too late for the media to concentrate on news-gathering rather than analysis.
By Robert VerBruggen
"If newspapers could do it over again, they should have sold off their physical assets, hired more reporters, editors and freelancers at a lower initial salary, opened more news bureaus around the world (if only in the form of solitary stringers working out of their apartments) instead of shutting them down, and demanded more hard news reporting from their reporters and a lot less editorializing and analysis.
"If that sounds counterintuitive, so is the entire history of high tech. Every time a threatened industry has tried to survive by adopting the new paradigm it has failed. The only solution is to come up with an even newer paradigm of your own."
This actually isn't as counterintuitive as it sounds. The blogosphere is killing the MSM not for its reporting but for its analysis -- as you'll see even on this blog, most posts start with a link to an MSM source.
Take, for a major example, the Dan Rather fake document scandal. Rather's team did all the reporting, messed it up, and the bloggers (who have a wide range of skills and expertise) caught the problem.
Bloggers, excepting the best, very rarely make phone calls or do research beyond Google searches. Most have full-time jobs of their own, so they're not going out and covering stuff. Maybe it's not too late for the media to concentrate on news-gathering rather than analysis.
By Robert VerBruggen
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