For years now newspapers have been closing down all over the world - and once again it has been a miserable year for publishers. It’s not only paper, but also TV and radio who find themselves under attack from the net.
Personally I love paper - but apart from my weekly edition of the ever great Economist - I don’t read any newspaper or magazine at all.
Overall mainstream media has lost the plot and has been to unwilling to confront the technological change and - MOST OF ALL - the contact to the reader. And there is still that thing called competence …
I knew many journalists in the early 90’s who sneered at so called "New Media" and it’s shiny new world. Today they are either unemployed or deeply into Internet publishing. But still most of them don’t like talking to "the reader" - their very audience. But if you don’t care about your readers - why should they care about you?
Make me smarter, not dumber!
Blogging brought back the "citizen journalist" - who stands on the same "height" as their readers and therefore love the exchange, no matter how bloody it is.
Many great publishing houses and broadcasters have started blogs on their own - trying desperately to build that very same relationship. But they usually fail. You can’t pit the passion of a 24/7 self-propelled blogger against a 9 to 5 work attitude of a normal employee.
But there is a final big mistake all these stations and newspapers make: the lack of depth, seriousness and competence. In the days before Google and Wikipedia it was very hard work for a normal person to research anything those newscasters and experts told us. Today it’s easy to find out if these "professionals" are competent.
Dunno where all that crap is coming from?!
Most mass media web sites are written poorly, offer no depth and real competence. They still just recycle what comes out of the big news agencies like AP or Reuters. Even my beloved BBC publishes only very short and not very deep news articles - I dare not to mention CNN or MSNBC, which are a lot worse.
Most publishers are still under the illusion that if they offer infotainment and loads of celebrity crap people and advertisers will flock to them. That is why all stations and newspapers have so much trivial crap on their sites, pages and shows. And they is why they are all so exchangeable and don’t deserve any viewers loyalty.
Keep the paper - and give us competence!
Plus: since they all use the same news agencies all their content reads and looks the same. Reuters and AP also offer video and images - not just text anymore. That is why most smarter surfers "leech" the news directly from these providers - not from the recyclers like CNN or any newspaper.
But readers have to evolve as well. They have to be more willing to pay for good stuff and services. Only a few web sites so far have managed to get some money directly from their audience. And that’s a shame! Good journalism shouldn’t be funded by advertising, but by the readers.
But I am afraid in our "all for free" culture this won’t happen.