I like catchy titles…they’re so essential in our short-attention-span world. So “I am the murderer of the news” caught my eye. Written by Brian Till of the non-partisan New America Foundation, it ran in the SF Chronicle’s Christmas Eve edition (and was syndicated elsewhere.) In the column, the sprightly (judging by his photo) Mr. Till bemoans that his generation is getting a free ride, consuming online media and ignoring the ads that are the online press’s only revenue stream.
He writes, “I’ve yet to find a member of my generation – as enthusiastic as many are about blogs and new media – who’d rather see the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times fail than cough up $100 for a subscription. But nobody’s ever asked us to; nobody ever explained to us that we are the free riders killing the industry.” This strikes me as disingenuous, but it does point to the larger trend of free content (music, video) and who/how it will be supported in the future. Newspapers are closing, reporters are being laid off, and the whole concept of “free press” is being taken for a ride. So much of our media is now free of charge, and soon free of the printing press…but what happens when the last newspaper and wire service shut down?
Till notes, “Unless you trust blogs to accurately and consistently report news, or trust government and business to be completely forthcoming with all their misdeeds, you ought to recognize the free ride you’ve been on and stand to pay your fare.” Till’s partial answer was to subscribe to four newspapers. This is admirable, but as Bill McKibben writes in Orion magazine:”Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change—call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy.”
Till’s greater contribution is to continue the conversation around what needs to change in order for the mainstream media to survive. His answer revolves around somehow awakening people to the need to pay for the services rendered by the “mainstream media”: the wire services and old time newspapers, with their editors and reporters and ombudsmen and editorial board. Insert air quotes where you like in that previous sentence, but the Fourth Estate has served a vital role of empowering the people for the past 300+ years….I’m not sure Huffington Post and Hot Air are adequate substitutes. What’s the answer? Doubtless money will be involved, but for now let’s keep reading and talking and maybe worrying, so that we don’t get to the point made by a great song from an “older” generation: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
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