Chris, do you have ANY data that shows the majority of American newspapers printed stories that said Saddam was behind 9/11? Secondly, do you have any data that shows that most of the roughly 70 percent of your country who you say believed Saddam was behind 9/11 (what is your source for that gem btw? MSM? A newspaper sponsored survey?) formed that opinion from newspapers, and not TV or talk-radio?

I agree with you that most of the MSM agenda is set by PR agencies etc but I’m not sure the WMD example is the best one to illustrate this point, nor is it a refutation of the fact that most non-MSM do get their source info from MSM.

Here’s the good news for newspapers.

Internet advertising doesn’t work – for anyone: publishers, consumers and mostly advertisers.

Which is why it’s so cheap. Soon enough advertisers will wake up to the fact it has next to NO value. Full page, four color ads in print have impact on a readership spending 30-45 mins who have come in, via choice, paying for the privilige, via the front door/page. Most of the NYT’s c. 20 million unique visitors spend less than five minutes, even seconds, and come in via the side door. Advertisers will get over this internet advertising myth, not for all advertising (e.g search) but where the big bucks money is: corporate identity/ brand/advocacy advertising. So the model isn’t broken, it’s just in transition.

If you don’t believe me, tell me the name of more than one advert you recall from your most recent visit to your most favoured news site. The pricing model has shifted from cost per thousand (readers), to cost per click, to cost per action and it will go to cost per transaction. Advertisers know they need not pay for eyeballs, but results only. And when they figure that out, they’ll be paying peanuts to the NYT Company who still struggle to increase digital revenues above 13% of total revenues, including About.com. In other words, it just IS NOT WORKING. Not for the publishers but neither for the advertisers, or, if you regard advertising as something useful, for the consumer.

The bigger problem is the cultural shift in whether people place value on being broadly and well-informed (and not being DELUDED). It’s got bugger all to do with the Internet. If you’ve got $30 billion dollars a year to dish-out (which you haven’t), give it to your schools. If you want a prime example of deluded Americans, Bob and John have to be right up there.

If you wish citizens to engage with serious journalism, here are a few pointers:

If newspapers, or news organisations, want to prosper, they must put the word ‘new’ back into what they do. If there was one web site or newspaper that when we opened it, contained truth that we had NEVER heard of, seen, or read of before, we’d be there, we’d be paying and advertisers would want to be there alongside us. To say advertising is no longer linked to journalism is the sort of nonsense only journalists are able to discuss with a straight face (that and use of terms like “testicular fortitude”).

Secondly, the NYT model of ‘objectivity’ is dead. People need to put their money on truth, not balance.

Thirdly, mankind will always love narrative and STORY. Give us stories. Not complicated.

Fourthly, virtually everything taught at virtually every J-School is redundant. Chris’ post on the LANGUAGE of journalism, who created it and when, says it all.

Finally, let’s start talking about ‘a conditional information age’ (something I published an article on ten years ago or more now): what would could/should, happen, not what has happened.

Lastly, Robert and John are good guys, intelligent and sincere, and dead wrong. What they are right about is the way most non-MSM info comes first from MSM. This is correct Chris, and there is lots of academic work out there that shows this, but so what? Most MSM info comes from PR people. News organisations need to take PR agencies out of the equation – there’s your 85-95% source, including WMD.)

BTW: re. public broadcasting/NPR/NYT: the highly respected head of nyt.com left nyt.com to join NPR. I think she did this for a reason and the reason is where I started this post. Internet advertising is so much hot air. Advertising on it doesn’t work, and any pay barrier will fail.

What will eventually change is how advertising on the Internet will eventually successfully work. That will come from agencies, publishers and designers, but we’re a long way from it yet.

The danger is corporate inertia at companies like the NYT: their deep, pathetic, irresponsible fear of change; their avoidance of making the radical changes required; their belief that they, who created this mess, can solve it; their deep belief they are smarter than you. Editors and Managers, their total lack of imagination and ability to think beyond their legacy inheritances. They can’t tolerate the thought of anyone solving their problems other than themselves, they won’t roll dice on change projects. Google launch thousands of products, few come to being. The NYT did a share buy back at the top of its historic price range and bought a massive new HQ (which saddled them with enormous debt). The people in charge there are not competent. If change doesn’t come quickly you will lose the NYT and other great American institutions and the U.S.A. will be in very serious trouble. They have to act before it is too late. The demise of American journalism, if it happens, will be a self-inflicted and entirely avoidable wound.

I agree also with what Alexandre says above about the value of stories that come from sources other than news organizations, and with that, the revolt against mindlessly depending on certain/few filters :

If journalism is about filters, may it be more important to allow people to build their own filters than to rely on self-appointed gatekeepers?

That’s happening. I am learning to choose, who to trust. But we cannot avoid filters altogether.

I agree with Glen S. above about journalists and why we need them ( as I was thinking of John Burns) – the whole paragraph in which he says this:

They’re not “experts” in any sense other than the fact that they may have some perspective gained from their cumulative experiences, but even that has to be taken with a grain of salt. They are, in the end, storytellers, which is why we (the public) need to hear from several of them for any given event in order to have an informed picture.

Reporting is about judgement, choices- which stories to tell, the sensibility, the underlying world view behind the telling. Journalists know how to write as well as tell a story.

Alexandre:

My personal answer to your last question, Chris, revolves around a pretty simple idea: people can be trained to think critically.

I agree wholeheartedly. I am still learning. It feels good to keep the brain stretching. So if we think more critically, we can deal with the filters which cannot in any case be avoided. We have been so liberated with the internet. There is so much available. But also we need the curiosity and concern about the world – and to know that we each are a necessary part of it. Anyone else’s eyes, brain, heart in a faraway scene can connect to mine now more easily. And that someone could still be a professional “journalist”. We have access… the profession has the needed competition to excel… to offer something more or different or better.

A healthy democracy does connect to good journalism but now, not that only. On the other end- an adequately informed public starts with education, acceptance of the responsibilities of citizenship and the work, the caring, to become well informed, to know, to understand the issues. Journalism may be failing us- but I think there are too many out here failing to inform themselves adequately… too busy, to lazy, too selfish. I hear them out there shouting. They seem the easy victims of demagoguery. I don’t know what we do about that.

Lafond happens to be the spouse of our Canadian head of state. So, in a way, he’s the equivalent of Michelle Obama. What’s funny, though, is that he has been associated with the Quebec sovereignty movement I mentioned in the previous comment and he’s worked as something of a radio commentator. So he probably has interesting things to say about both journalism and nationalism.

What you say about live shows is quite accurate, as far as I know. Although, it’s a bit hard to know if the situation is much different from what it has been for quite a while. Among professional musicians, a tiny percentage ever made their money from royalties on recordings. Of course, recordings have been quite important in the recent history of music, as Attali exposes so well in Noise and his more recent work on Globalization. But the fact that Rock and Pop “Stars” have moved from an album-focused business model to other models which give a lot less weight to their recordings shouldn’t detract from the fact that most musicians aren’t Stars.

Among people with whom I play, there are several who do make a living through music. Some of them have played on albums which sold well but, as they weren’t the featured artists, the money they made wasn’t in the form of royalties. The situation has been pretty much the same for much of the history of sound recordings, with a tiny proportion of recordings by a tiny proportion of musicians make up for the overwhelming proportion of profits. In the late 1980s, a sound engineering trainee (and the owner of the French restaurant where I was working) was told that 95% of albums made my major labels carried a loss and that one album a year generated most of the profits for the likes of Sony Music. I didn’t search for these figures and they may be inaccurate, but they sound as if they were in-line with what several people have in mind, as a model. As you may have heard from Courtney Love’s math, even the most successful albums may not bring that much money to the musicians they feature. If I remember correctly, after everything is paid back (recording studios charge you for everything), members of a four-piece band selling an album which “goes platinum” may only make the equivalent of the average salary in the US. Of course, Courtney Love herself may have made more money than that and “Stars” have other revenue streams apart from albums. But the point is that recordings haven’t been the primary source of revenue of many musicians in the past. They are the main (though not the sole) source of revenue for the major labels, most of which are associated with other businesses.

People with whom I play in Montreal and musicians with which I’ve worked in Mali tend to consider recordings as promotional items for their other activities. When, with Montreal-based Dakan, we recorded an album (thanks to a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts), much of the idea was to have something to sell at shows, get invited to festivals, etc. For several reasons, this album has yet to be released (we went through the studio a few years ago) and we keep thinking about it as something we would be able to use to reach the next step. The recording isn’t an end in itself.

For the main musician with which I’ve been working, in Mali, sales of the more than thirty “albums” he recorded pale in comparison to what he gets from fans. I can’t remember if he was the beneficiary or if it was with another member of Mali’s hunters’ association, but I know that one musician was given a Range Rover by a fan. Duties on such vehicles are as expensive as the vehicles themselves so that gift is even larger than what it’d be in North America. One reason such gifts are made is that music serves to promote people, individually and collectively.

Yes, music as a form of advertising.

Something similar happens in the well-known case of Tecno-Brega, in Brazil. They let people copy the recordings and they get paid to do shout-outs.

Congolese music uses a similar system and it’s possibly the most popular musical genre on the African continent.

Point is, music isn’t content to be owned. Music isn’t a “content industry.” Why should journalism be?