I’m sitting here reading a newspaperman’s blog about newspaper and readership and it suddenly hits me.
The media – newspapers and more so TV – are losing their ability to dictate what the news is.
Newspapers that have enough editorial staff members to do so, typically have “budget meetings” where they sit around a table, look at what stories they have in hand and in the works and decide what’s important and what’s not. They may think they know what you and I will be interested in, but chances are they don’t.
Sometimes they decide what they think you should be interested in. It might be a school bond issue or a sewer or highway project. Never mind that almost no one shows up at the governmental meetings where these measures are discussed and decided. The editors know this stuff will affect your wallet by way of taxes. So they display the story prominently on the front page and, if it’s written intelligently and clearly enough to make you see how it affects you, you’ll read it and be glad you did.
But most readers aren’t influenced by those editorial choices. Unless a sexy headline or great, well-displayed photo snags their attention, they’re moving on in search of something that they have a personal interest in.
The Internet and especially search engines like Google have turbocharged that behavior. Now, you can search the whole World Wide Web for the specific topic or issue that interests you. Or you can blog about it yourself and have a potential audience several times that of the local newspaper.
Enough of that has been going on in recent years to give rise to the blogosphere which, in many cases, is beating the old media at their own game.
It’s the blogosphere that generates and perpetuates news stories that old media, particularly self-absorbed fossils like The New York Times, completely miss. Like the ACORN scandal. And Climategate.
And it’s bloggers who have been connecting the dots and discovering prior connections between the “party crashing” Salahis and President Obama and Tareq Salahi’s involvement with the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) , a pro-Palestine lobby demanding the “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants, even though the organization tried to remove his name from its list of board members.
How the old media will respond to this paradigm shift in the way people decide for themselves what is news remains to be seen. So far, the best they’ve been able to come up with is the latest celebrity flap – Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, and on and on.
As someone who spent most of my adult life in newspapers, I have very mixed emotions about these changes. I used to think it was a newspaper’s job to tell people what they need to know. I still do, but they have to find a way to reconcile it with what they want to know, all the while paying attention to unpopular views and unconventional wisdom.
I have a foot in both camps and, unlike some newspapermen, don’t see all bloggers as jabbering fools. I see many of them as citizen journalists who are much more motivated to get at the truth than are the “professional” journalists who don’t want to make waves. And there are more than a few of us who have reported for a living and know how badly the old media is missing the real stories of our time.
