Evolving Media For Better Or Worse

TW: Media is evolving, nothing wrong with that per se although the traditional MSM revenue models (in particular for print) are shattered and at this point no one appears to have a viable new revenue model. News magazines are quickly shrinking in size (Business Week) if not going away completely (US News and World Report is no longer a weekly but a monthly). The new realities mean those who focus (e.g. Economist or Politico) are thriving relatively. There are a couple of implications the impact of which remain unclear. One, will we all bounce around in our own echo chambers not really learning merely receiving validation for our own biases and ideologies. Two, who will conduct the investigate reporting which fuels our democratic institutions?

I agree with the suggestion that not for profit or at least heavily subsidized entities will emerge to conduct some of what are considered today's MSM functions.

From Ezra Klein at American Prospect:
"The thesis of my earlier post is that the Politico treats politics much like ESPN treats sports. It uses that as the connective tissue that makes both stimulus and Bristol Palin interesting. It's for fans. You might even say it's for politicos. And what the outlet is brilliant at doing is situating itself at the center of their world. It's closer to the nerve center of the average news junkie than, I think, any other outlet going today. Its startlingly rapid rise reflects that.

But in unbundling politics from news, just as newspapers are (unhappily) unbundling news from classifieds, we're getting to a point where it's not clear what subsidizes the articles that don't sell: The long pieces on urban decline in Baltimore or Medicare reimbursement fraud. Politico has figured out that maximal efficiency for a political news operations doesn't include those stories. Other newspapers are figuring out the same thing, and foreign bureaus are closing and niche beats -- health, labor, etc -- are being eliminated. This is not a story confined to the Politico.

Maybe the answer is that these beats accept that they cannot turn a profit and more initiatives like the Kaiser Family Foundation's health news service emerge. Or maybe some of these beats simply die out. But the Politico's model will be imitated because its internal logic is so tightly coherent. And as it finds more imitators, more news junkies go towards the outlets that feed their addictions more directly. This is not the Politico's fault. The market for news was always inefficient: It gave the reader lots of what she didn't want and survived because it didn't need her to pay for it. As competitive pressures force greater efficiency, however, more efficient outlets, like Politico, are emerging. That's what you'd expect to happen. But many of the media's most important functions are its most inefficient. And it's not clear how they survive."
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=2009&base_name=john_harris_responds