We'll Make it Up on Volume

Newsweek is up for sale. Another in a long series of media tales of collapse and change. The clip below from The Daily Show features the editor of Newsweek talking about the announcement of the sale and what it means, in his eyes, from the perspective of what is being lost in America as more of the traditional journalism outlets consolidate, shrink, close and simply drift away. Jon Stewart, as always, is razor sharp in pointing out the many realities of the world around him. And, in this case, it strikes me as being critical in that he notes that the "Emperor has no clothes" observation to be made about content aggregators is that they will have nothing to aggregate if nobody is around to do works of journalism. And we are fast approaching that time.

Meacham also notes that it's impossible to do quality journalism if people are unwilling to pay for it. And if that becomes the case, the audience will get exactly what it pays for--FOX News. All opinion and no reporting. Comment and analysis without journalism is empty. A meaningless, uninformed shell for deliberately uninformed people. And I think it's sad to face a potential reality of an American public that goes in a generation from being daily consumers--willing to pay for it--of news and information into an uninformed, easily inflamed, unthinking mob. I can remember the daily newspaper that showed up at my parent's house everyday. And we were clearly a working-class family complete with my mother being a stay-home mom and my dad carrying a lunch box out the door every day along with the tools of his carpentry and brick mason trades. No elites here. And at 6 p.m. every night, it was the local TV news from stations in the closest cities followed by the network news. We were an NBC household so it wasn't Uncle Walter.

I'm not advocating the clinging to print journalism. I think print on paper has lots of life left in it but it is much less life than we used to think and I believe that print will continue to shrink as the ad revenues that support continue to wither. But I also think that we have to get back to seeing that there is value in hard work and reporting. You can't aggregate what isn't there and, as Meacham points out, we don't see any of these various aggregators getting rich and building Rupert Murdoch style empires on content aggregation. It's as empty as the dot-com bubble with all of those companies that were losing money on every transaction who justified it with the statement that is at the head of this entry.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jon Meacham
www.thedailyshow.com
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