Weekend reading
by henrycopelandSaturday, January 29th, 2005
Atlantic Monthly: “Flexibility, irony, class consciousness, contrarianism. I’d gone to Princeton, and soon I’d go to Oxford, and these, I was about to tell Karl, are the ways one gets ahead now’not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo.”
Washington Post: “Perhaps best of all, you can indulge your megalomaniacal tendencies by approving or declining potential ads at will.”
Some niches are so small they’re approaching the vanishing point. There are now hundreds of thousands of bloggers, individuals who publish news, commentary, and other content on their own idiosyncratic Web sites. Some boast readerships exceeding those of prestigious print magazines, but most number their faithful in the double and triple digits. …It’s instructive to remember, however, that the centralized, homogeneous mass-media environment of Cronkite’s day was really an anomaly, an exception to the historical rule. For two centuries before the arrival of television America had a wild, cacophonous, emphatically decentralized media culture that mirrored society itself. And something like that media culture seems to be returning right now. …
Yet even though the media of the [early 19th century] were profuse, partisan, and scandalously downmarket, they were at the same time a powerful amalgamator that encouraged participatory democracy and forged a sense of national identity. Michael Schudson, a professor of communication and sociology at the University of California at San Diego and the author of The Sociology of News (2003), says that the rampant partisanship displayed by newspapers “encouraged people to be attentive to their common enterprise of electing representatives or presidents.” Commenting that “politics was the best entertainment in town in the middle of the 19th century,” Schudson compares its effect to that of sports today. “Professional baseball is an integrative mechanism even though it works by arousing very partisan loyalties,” he says. In other words, newspapers helped pull the country together not by playing down differences and pretending everyone agreed but by celebrating and exploiting the fact that people didn’t. It’s the oldest American paradox: nothing unifies like individualism. …
The “Trust us, we know better” ethos that undergirded the broadcast era today seems increasingly antique. If red and blue America agree on anything, it’s that they don’t believe the media. To traditionalists worried about the future of news, this attitude reflects a corrosive cynicism. But in another way it’s much like the skepticism that animates great journalism. As the media have become more transparent, and suffered their own scandals, the public has learned to think about the news the same way a good journalist would’that is, to doubt everything it’s told. …
Moreover, for all the pointed criticism and dismissive eye-rolling that niche and mass outlets direct each other’s way, the two are becoming more and more symbiotic. Where would the Drudge Report and the blogging horde be without The New York Times, CBS News, and The Washington Post? Were it not for the firsthand reporting offered by those media dinosaurs, the Internet crowd would have nothing to talk about. Conversely, where would the Web versions of mass outlets be without the traffic that is directed their way by the smaller players? If there’s a new media establishment taking form, it’s shaped like a pyramid, with a handful of mass outlets at the top and innumerable niches supporting them from below, barking upward. …
And although much changes in the media over time, there are some eternal truths. Most outlets crave two things, money and impact, and the easiest path to both is the old-fashioned one: grow your audience. Ambitious niches will always seek to become larger, and in so doing to attract a more diverse audience. It’s only a matter of time before the first mass blog is identified, celebrated, and showered with minivan ads.
Finally, there’s no substantive evidence yet that the rise of the niches is bad for democracy. The fractious, disunited, politically partisan media of the nineteenth century heightened public awareness of politics, and taught the denizens of a new democracy how to be citizens. Fast forward to the present. The United States just held an election that was covered by noisy, divisive, often thoroughly disreputable post-broadcast-era media. And 120 million people, 60 percent of eligible voters, showed up to cast their ballots’a higher percentage than have voted in any election since 1968. Maybe we’re on to something.
I’d only add two points: the pyramid implies hierarchy, while the new model is probably more of a fast mutating, 10 dimensional mobius. We’ll see that minivan ad this year. It’s definitely coming, for better or worse. Our job will be to make sure that the ad sheds the motifs of hierarchical megaphone media and adjusts to the reality of the blogosphere’s skeptical, conversational maelstrom.
I listened to the BBC reporting from Iraq’s election. When even jaded Brit journos are teary eyed, you know something awesome is happening.
February 1st, 2005 at Feb 01, 05 | 7:51 pm
Sounds like an interesting piece. I’m finally going to re-subscribe to the Atlantic … buying two or three issues a year costs more than a discount sub.
I’ll tell ya, though, I wonder where these people grew up … the ones who remember a time when everybody loved Cronkite or something. Where I grew up, Cronkite was generally known as a communist sonofabitch, and I’m sure that wasn’t a rare sentiment nationwide. (People also cheered JFK’s death in the South. Blacks and a few urban whites supported him; the rest were glad to see him in the ground.)
Here’s the thing: print & broadcast journalists missed every media-fragmentation story of the last 25 years. They missed cable news, e-mail, fanzines, Compuserve & GEnie & Prodigy, BBS’s, newsgroups, AOL, AM talk radio, etc. They missed it all, just as they missed blogs for *several years* and would’ve never noticed Drudge if not for the Clinton-Monica thing, which was ultimately a story about Newsweek, and of course journalists love nothing more than to write about themselves.
In the mid-80s, I noticed my dad had built up his own media diet from several “fringe” sources that were all brand new: He got up at dawn and watched the weather channel while making coffee, to plan whether he would fly that day or not. He listened to Rush Limbaugh on a crappy little AM station that had just switched from an oldies/standards format. He read & posted to a bulletin board for pilots on the Commodore online service. And he subscribed to all kinds of xeroxed-desktop-published newsletters about sailplanes, experimental aircraft, long-distance motorcycle riding, etc. Didn’t read a daily paper and didn’t watch any news that I recall, except for the local weather and a science program on CNN (which was new itself).
There were a lot of people like that 20-odd years ago. The “monolithic” media just didn’t notice. Oh, they noticed an extreme now and then: Ruby Ridge, OK City, etc. But they didn’t notice many millions of well-off small businessmen and homeowners and hobbyists and punk-rock kids who left the “mainstream media” and never came back. That’s why professional journalists were so confused by Reagan’s landslides.