Jonathan Schwarz at Tom Tomorrow headlines a piece today "Can’t elect a new media."
This is, of course, grossly wrong. The fact it’s still believed shows there is a major weakness among progressives, a blind spot.
The reason is that people like Mr. Schwarz think of these things in terms of "elections." That’s not the process. It’s a market process.
It’s because journalism is a market process that the media seems so skewed against Democrats. There are, in fact, two types of markets:
- Growing markets, where the premium is on growth.
- Stagnant or declining markets, where the premium is on profit.
It’s made more complex (and more tilted) by the fact that not all business decisions are made for rational business reasons. Sometimes people just want to play or they want to seem important. Some people are altruistic, and sometimes they in fact want to meddle in politics.
Newspaper and TV journalism today are declining markets, amenable to meddling. Profit maximization is the only rational reason to participate. But it’s not the only reason. There are people who think they can control what people think by owning the means of ideological production, and these folks are naturally attracted to media properties. Just remember we’re talking here of business ethics, not so-called professional ethics.
There are many major media properties either on the market or entering the market, as people within the market recognize the changing nature of its business landscape, as they see newspapers slowly dieing and broadcast stagnating. Knight-Ridder was split up, Tribune Co. will be, and MSNBC is going to fade away. These are just the headline acts.
The buyers will either be trying to maximize profit — and a declining company is perfect for private ownership — or they will be trying to tell people what to think. So you can expect both these media to become, in fact, even more conservative than they appear to be now, over time. Negative growth attracts piranhas, who tend to be conservative. Billionaires today are also unafraid to try to force their views on others — it’s the fashion.
Yet, Mr. Schwarz, there should be hope in your breast and a song in your heart. Here’s why.
This medium is growing. It is growing rapidly.
Growth has a natural liberal skew. It represents change, and progress. The people who are drawn to fast-growing businesses like change, they embrace it. Even when they’re conservative politically, they’re usually of the libertarian stripe.
Now it’s true that this medium is different from what came before. But one of the major differences is that it’s self-selective. In other words, people only go to Web sites they like. This is one reason why political sites are either all one thing or all the other — people who can select from among a million channels just want one they like, not one they’re ambivalent about. Objectivity is naturally ambivalent.
The challenge before everyone in this medium is to monetize what they’re doing. Most people in the blogosphere are too busy creating content to do that, so most don’t monetize very effectively. (I don’t.) But there are increasing numbers of tools to do this — Amazon.Com announced one just today.
There are also motives other than profit for launching a Web site or blog.
But given the logical skew of this growing medium, Jonathan, there is no reason for you to be sad. Be happy. People do vote for their reporters, all the time.
Increasingly they’re going to vote for you. Because you have experience in this growing medium. Because you’re linked to a powerful brand. Because they like the cut of your jib.
All you really need to do is point your ship toward profit. It’s those who profit from the present who will dominate the future. (That’s why we have that picture up there, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. I for one welcome our new Google overlords…)
