I love hanging out at the pub. There’s just something about sitting in the corner with a good book sipping a lovely beer and listening to the music, watching all the little dramas unfold around you. Here, a couple is hooking up, the man furiously attempting to impress the woman with a monolog of all his achievements, the woman obviously weary of the man’s egoistic ramblings and not liking him very much, but going to blow him in the parking lot later anyway just because she wants a little affection. Over there, one of the regulars is breaking up with her boyfriend….again. They break up about this time every week, yet always leave together at the end of the evening. Everywhere, talk and noise and people doing people-things — that’s the real draw of the bar. It’s prime people-watching territory.
Sometimes you meet interesting folks there, and discussions take off unexpectedly. A few months ago? I met Allison the lady lumberjack and we chatted about competitive axe throwing, and I got an invite to pop over to the Maine Lumberjack Show to see her compete once they open for the summer. I’ll have to see if I can make it!
Tonight, though, as I was leaving the bar I found myself drawn into accidental conversation with a slip of a creature, brown haired and willowy and immediately likable whom we’ll call “Cat” in this entry. She was there with the band, having a drink at the bar and making almost worried pronouncements over the newspaper spread ont he bar in front of her. “News is dead” was the gist of what she said “or so the people I talked with today think….”
This caught my interest, of course, and before I knew it, we were discussing the news media and how the internet affects traditional news outlets. Turns out she was a freelance writer with an interest in the sciences, and she was referring to a meeting she’d had with some folks at Some Major Local Newspaper where several were pronouncing the imminent demise of the major news outlets. Revenues are down! Readership is falling! Oh no!
Cat was skeptical of the doomsayers, but clearly worried for her future. She writes for a living and there are plenty of stories out there if one just wants to go find them, but the number of traditional outlets for publication are dwindling, so it’s getting hard for a freelancer like her to get published (and subsequently paid). Not to mention being _heard_, which is in its own way more important than mere food on the table. She was fretting not only over the changing news market but about her own future place in it, and wondering how best to bridge the gap between old media and new constructively.
I suggested that traditional news can learn something from the “bloggers” (I hate that word — it’s an awkward, ugly kludge, but it appears we’re stuck with it for the moment) and news aggregator sites like Fark, Digg, and Slashdot. Because the internet gives everyone on it the ability to be heard world wide, there’s no dearth of information and viewpoints out there and for many types of events, average joes like myself can step in and report news, sometimes as well or better than the pros can. Particularly easy prey are the happenstance, where someone just falls into a story, and “local color” and opinion pieces. News of the odd. Not-News. Editorials. The ‘nets are rife with this sort of thing — it’s everywhere you turn. There’s so much of it, in fact, that it has become almost devalued. That’s where the aggregators come in; they add value to the stories they pick up by filtering them through a community of more or less likeminded folks and gathering the results in one spot for easy perusal and comment.
This is something that traditional newspapers can do readily; instead of (or in conjunction to) publishing on the web, they can offer a printed journal for those the ‘nets have left behind, making up for dwindling revenue by turning for more and more of their content to the (ugh!) “blogosphere” (*shudder* Another hideous word for an otherwise nifty thing!). By letting the web do what it does best — color and opinion — the papers can concentrate their resources on on something they have that the bloggers currrently largely lack….access.
There are rare exceptions right now where bloggers have the ability to get to public figures, talk to those “in the know”, and gather data outside that readily available to the general public. Ain’t I Cool News, for instance, seems to have a few folks that can get behind the scense to report on the latest movie developments, and many of the tech review sites get early looks at new hardware coming out thanks to the awareness of manufacturers to the growing power of the ‘nets. Most of that access is limited to particualr venues, however; so far there’s no real equivalent that I know of to a Press Pass online. And a Press Pass tends to open some of the doors that John Q. Public has trouble walking through.
Traditional news has leveraged this through news services in the past — the AP newswire, passing along their access to news sources to small-town papers that wouldn’t otherwise have it, is a prime example. News services can embed reporters in places the rest of us can’t readily reach, and devote resources to digging deeper, perhaps, than the average citizen can, and that translates into more value.
This only lightly touches on the things we discussed tonight; Cat was sharp witted despite the beer and offered more than a few observations of her own, especially concerning those niche stories that would never get reported were it left to the big news corporations. I think the woman has little to worry about as the journalistic world changes around her. Yes, ad revenues are down and readership is falling; readers on the net tend to snag one story and hie off to other things, not sticking around to peruse your other online offerings. The future for traditional news outlets is going to be tough. It seems, though, that by stepping back from fluff pieces (allowing us netside to dominate there — we’re good at it!) and concentrating on their strengths (good editorial practices, filtering the dross, and focussing their dwindling resources on access and depth outside the reach of the common blogger), traditional media has a long future ahead of it.
Just my two cents…..and thanks for sharing that beer, Cat and E! 
Tags: media
