Perhaps you’re thinking you missed the huge celebratory headlines commemorating a record high closing on the Dow yesterday. Of course, you’ve missed nothing. Collectively the media have deemed this story hardly worth reporting. The robust condition of the economy fails to interest the legacy media.
A lot of people suspect that this is because the media hate George W. Bush and that therefore reporting on anything that could redound to Bush’s favor is out of the question. Politics surely does have something to do with it. If for some reason you choose to afflict yourself with Lou Dobbs’ nightly ignoramus-fest featuring his daily updates on “THE WAR ON THE MIDDLE CLASS,” you know that class warfare, xenophobia and complete economic ignorance have yet to be completely relegated to history’s ashbin.
But there’s another factor at work. For most Americans who work in most industries, the economy is chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much. But if you happen to work at a legacy media outpost, the good ship prosperity has left the harbor without you. Newsrooms across America are cutting staff and not giving raises. Circulation numbers (and ratings) continue to decline with no floor yet in sight. It’s understandable enough that if you work in the media, even if you happen not to be a raging-leftist-borderline-socialist, you’re probably having trouble perceiving that the rest of the country is enjoying prosperous times.
THE MAIN PROBLEM WITH THE legacy media is they’ve yet to adjust to 21st century or even late 20th century economic realities. On Wednesday night, I went to hear the Boston Globe’s (and Townhall.com’s, I’m proud to say) Jeff Jacoby deliver a speech. At one point, he was musing about the Depression racking our nation’s newsrooms, and one of his comments showed that the powers that be in their clumsy efforts to fix things resemble a group of ink-stained Herbert Hoovers.
Jeff mentioned that the head-honchos want guys like him to blog. I was no Economics major, but I don’t understand how making Jeff’s product available for free would make his audience more likely to plop out 50 cents for it at a newsstand.
Virtually every newspaper with the exception of the Wall Street Journal seems to suffer a similar conceptual failure. The product the New York Times gives away for free on the web is actually superior to the dead tree version you have to lay out your hard earned cash to purchase; the virtual edition is updated with headlines throughout the day and the maniacal rantings of Paul Krugman and company are kept safely behind a subscription-only firewall.
The newspapers face another problem that their brethren on television also deal with. There are so many more information delivery products out there than there were a generation ago, no one gets market share by being the only game (or one of the two or three games) in town. It wasn’t always that way.
SO WHAT CAN THE LEGACY MEDIA DO? It’d probably help if they stopped letting their money-losing virtual operations cannibalize their revenue-producing dead tree products. But that would require recognizing that they’re in a particular kind of industry, one that belongs decidedly to the past instead of the future.
But the fundamental answer is even harder. The only way forward is to build a better mousetrap. The good news is that thoughtful readers have proposed a myriad of ways in which America’s dailies could improve their product. If the Los Angeles Times began listening to Patterico, they would soon be selling more newspapers.
Of course it’s much easier for these stodgy institutions to take comfort in the familiar rituals of the past, even if those rituals are leading to abject failure. Such is the nature of any dieing industry.
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