Media and the commercial lee shore

I've seen a number of opinion or analysis pieces over the past eight weeks regarding the layoffs in the mainstream media.  Media outlets everywhere have been battening down the hatches in anticipation of hard times ahead, just as have other companies anticipating choppy economic waters.

But the media fleet, unlike other sectors, are already in shoal waters, with masts and rigging down, some holed hulls, a hard wind from the sea and the prospect of a lee shore.  They were already in peril.  Things are getting worse.

From Cause of Journalism’s Woes? Tech Changes, Yes, But Partisanship Too by Carl M. Cannon.  Fine as far as it goes.    

My interpretation is that there are six major trends which have come together to create this existential crisis of the mainstream media.  Far-and-away, the most wounding has been the displacement of print advertising by internet advertising.  Radio, TV, and newspapers and news magazines were the means to reach customers even twenty years ago.  Not so much anymore.  Internet platforms and services now dominate with better performance and greater effectiveness.  

But the other factors have contributed to the collapse of the industry as well.

1)  Lost advertising revenue - Advertising moved to the internet away from legacy media (TV, Radio, Newspapers and News magazines).  Internet advertising can be more finely targeted, more quickly adjusted, and performance more accurately measured.  

2)  Press release journalism - Once revenues started disappearing, Mainstream Media (MSM) had to make content creation much cheaper.  They have done so primarily by increasing the proportion of Opinion content and decreased Reporting content.  And for reporting, they now overwhelmingly rely on press releases from advocates, agencies, and interested parties instead of doing investigative reporting and independent reporting.  There is no more "speaking truth to power", there is mostly just "speaking for those in power."

3) Urban monoculture - From the 1950s-1980s, journalists were from all classes, levels of education attainment, walks of life, backgrounds, and parts of the country.  Not just from those places in the past, but still reporting from those places.  Now, the preponderance of MSM journalists are in the deep urban areas of a small handful of very large cities characterized by high density, high inequality, high crime, mono-political cultures (Progressive Democrats), high education attainment, middle class and above backgrounds, singular ideological affiliation, etc.  Journalists are reporting about a country they neither see nor experience.  Readers are being asked to consume content that is irrelevant and unreflective of their lives.  

4)  Reduced quality - Mainstream media is slower and more inaccurate than the alternatives.  With any breaking story, there is a better than even chance that you can find the story at all, find it quicker, and it more accurately reported than if you rely on The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC.  More than that, the patterns of error and omission by the MSM are also more and more transparent.  

There are two consequences to the above four primary drivers of the collapse of legacy MSM.  These consequence become, in turn, amplifiers of the above trends. 

5) Collapsed trust - Worse and more unreliable reporting, less accurate reporting, more biased reporting, and more quickly exposed errors in reporting in combination reduce trust.  Both trust in the product and trust in the brand.  Reduced trust further erodes reader or viewership.  Reducing advertising rates.  Reducing financial viability.  Distrust of MSM becomes its own contributor to the downfall of MSM.

6) Reportorial Bias - While this gets a lot more attention in many of the opinion pieces, and is a real issue, I am not certain that it is as contributive to the downfall as some make it out to be.  The bias is real and is important but I think the above factors are even more critical.  

Because there seems little prospect of revenue ever flowing back to MSM in volumes that would permit, better, faster, more accurate reporting, it is my anticipation that the MSM fleet will pile up on the hard shore of commercial reality, leaving flotsam and jetsam and fond memories of a long ago golden era.

What's next?  Anybody's guess.  There is a non-negligible chance it will be better.  Especially once we get through the tumult of change.