I’ve been on vacation the past couple weeks, but Time ran a Tuned In column of mine in my absence. A robo-column, if you will. The topic: the general implosion of the media business…
When the economy sneezes, the media business catches pneumonia. The problem for the media business in 2008 was that the economy caught pneumonia. When the economy gets pneumonia, the media business gets it too–then someone knocks it across the back of the head with a shovel.
…and how it’s directly connected to some of the same technological changes that make this a great time to use the media, if not necessarily to make a living from it:
When an earthquake shook Sichuan and terrorists shot up Mumbai, eyewitnesses’ texts poured out through Twitter. Some of the biggest scoops and best analysis in the election came from blogs and some of the best satire from YouTube. Political websites took off. The media have never been so ubiquitous or polymorphous. I can access more information on the phone in my back pocket than I could have, as a kid, in my hometown library.
I don’t want to belittle the problems of laid-off journalists (while, at the same time, I don’t want to act like they’re any worse than the problems of laid-off autoworkers either). But too often these days, stressed-out journalists talk about the media business as if it were the same thing as the media. The trick is to figure out how to use what’s right with the media to cure what’s wrong with it.