The death of The New York Times? cont'd
January 12, 2009 5:38 pm ET by Eric Boehlert
Times columnist David Carr looks at the recent Atlantic essay by Michael Hirschorn and comes to the same conclusion I did last week; if the Times went out of business it would be a big deal because, despite what some online optimists think, websites and bloggers and tweeters would not be able to replace what the huge news organization does.
Elsewhere, Carr pines for a Steve Jobs-type figure to come in and rescue newspapers the way Apple did the music industry. Writes Carr:
Remember that when iTunes began, the music industry was being decimated by file sharing. By coming up with an easy user interface and obtaining the cooperation of a broad swath of music companies, Mr. Jobs helped pull the business off the brink. He has been accused of running roughshod over the music labels, which are a fraction of their former size. But they are still in business.
Still in business, yes. But just barely. The idea that 99 cent downloads from iTunes pulled the music industry from the brink is pretty misleading. Music industry sales have absolutely cratered since the music-should-be-free mantra was unleashed by the Internet. The steep declines show no signs of abating and the revenue that iTunes is generating in no way offsets the losses for the music labels.
So while yes, it's nice that Apple convinced people songs are worth paying for, the idea that iTunes saved the music industry, and that an iTunes-like creation could save the newspaper industry, seems misplaced.
P.S. Am I the only one who notes the irony in that back during the Napster craze an awful lot of print journalists spent an awful lot of time lecturing the music industry about how it should stop fighting technology and should start embracing the Internet, even if that meant giving its product away. Today, lots of those print outlets are going out of business, or in danger of going under, thanks to the Internet.
IT'S A CRYING SHAME, that in the diverse forms that our news media takes in America, the television and radio broadcast medium has been staked out and claimed, almost in a first come first served manner, by just a few enormous corporate giants (G.E., Disney, Time-Warner, etc.), whose revenues and profits dwarf those of The New York Times Company: and yet what do those media giants do to merit the extraordinary powerful privilege of using our Public Resource, the precious (not allowed to you and me) Public Airwaves?
They give us Two And Half Men, brian williams, wolf blitzer, geraldo rivera, and a variety of other things whose highest and best use so far to the American People, has been to inspire Paddy Chayefsky to write "Network".
In a better more enlightened Democracy, this powerful and precious privilege to broadcast on the Public Airwaves, would be given to people with better intentions for the American People and their Democracy, than the likes of rupert murdoch and roger ailes, or carl icahn and the saudi royals he brokers the sale of our media to (again, Paddy's story was right on the mark).
It's too bad: if The New York Times had the broadcast privileges that rupert murdoch's News Corporation does, then it could do more than save them, it could save us too... it would be to their great profit, and ours also.
But alas, the Public Airwaves are no longer the Public's, are they?
I mean, those FCC Licenses are not actually licenses, but are deeds and titles of ownership, to be bought and sold and grandfathered in, and never issued or reissued based upon the good they can do to the American People and their Democracy, but instead are used against those People, as the power to influence and manipulate their political opinions...
And sell them an unending stream of crap, punctuated by the hack words and huckster faces of brian willaims and wolf blitzer and Two And A Half Men: all of it sold on an obscenely high margin, due to the fact that the very medium (unlike the newspaper of a publisher) is Public Property, a supposedly Public Resource, the Public Airwaves.
Our Public Airwaves: not to be used by you or me or anyone we know, including The New York Times.