Firstly, like a lot of material you'll find here it's a sort of newspaper scrapbook for my personal reference - my other news scrapbook you can find at A Place in the Auvergne.
Secondly, I just wanted to cut and paste the entire article to remind Virginia of one important element she has overlooked. Anyone can and will rip and burn your content without earning you a dime. For more evidence of this visit http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
Lastly, Virginia is yet again an example of media commentary from the No. 1 Newspaper Site in the U.S.A that fails to refer to the NYT and the implications for the journal she is writing for; a subject that it seems is off limits. Until the bitter end?
Content, the once and future king
By Virginia Heffernan
Sunday, December 7, 2008
For years, we in traditional media have consoled ourselves about the increasing irrelevance of our work. First, we insist that content is king. If a story, image, film or report is compelling enough it will flourish on any platform, dominate every spot. By this logic, creators, producers, artists and journalists should attend only to producing great work and leave the changes in the distribution and display of information to nerds in suits.
When that argument doesn't add up, we console ourselves another way. We say that classic 20th-Century forms like Hollywood movies and glossy magazines breed natural digital extensions. A video game can be spun out of "Gossip Girl." Social networks can coalesce around publications like The Economist or Vogue. Maybe these secondary media will draw people to the main event or maybe - we have been reluctant to notice - they will be the main event themselves. Either way, it's O.K. If a trained and talented old hand makes the primary content, young people who understand iMovie or know how to moderate message boards - someone's nephew or baby sitter, maybe - can spin off the other stuff.
Then there's the troublesome third argument, the one we know is true. This is the one that admits that the content that thrives in the new distribution-and-display systems is suspiciously different from the American popular culture we used to love even 10 years ago. Thrillers, it seems, don't flourish on Hulu. No one is reading a six-part investigative series about mayoral malfeasance on Twitter. And if it's the afterthought message boards - the ones moderated by interns - that draw all the traffic, why are we in old media pouring so much money and time into "main event" programming that goes unread and unviewed?
The third argument says we have to change. We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it's not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries - music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows - are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.
The journalist Jeff Jarvis has lately blamed his peers for not apprehending better the changes to our profession wrought by digital technology. The writer Ron Rosenbaum has responded that the best journalists were too busy working to philosophize. Both are right. For 10 years, journalists have hoped to avoid radical job retraining. And who can blame anyone in any profession, midcareer and set in her ways, for avoiding seminars on writing Google-friendly leads or opening her sources to readers? At the same time, a huge number of mainstream journalists have taken to blogging, signed up for Facebook and Twitter, linked to video and experimented with new forms. Jarvis and Rosenbaum are among them.
Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable. Take magazine writing. In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to "tell great stories" or "make arresting images." You don't study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to produce certain numbers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be succinct when a publication loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an "article" is understood mostly as a delivery vehicle for pictures of a sexy celebrity. The words stack up under certain kinds of headlines that also adhere to strict conventions as to size and tone, and eventually they appear alongside certain kinds of photos and illustrations with certain kinds of captions on pages of certain dimensions that are often shared with advertisements. Just as shooting film for a Hollywood movie is never just filming and acting in a TV ad is never just acting, writing for a magazine is never just writing.
The fact that articles live in digital form and no longer, primarily, on paper, frees them from certain constraints that seem absolutely normal to old-media people and archaic - if not just stupid - to everyone else. Take an example from a recent issue of Self magazine. It contains an article about volunteer work, one that could have been written in a million ways. But because it appears in a magazine with newsstand sales, a subscriber base of women and ads from cosmetics companies and pharmaceuticals, it is, perforce, a colloquial personal essay that expresses in its DNA deeply held beliefs about how women's magazines work and sell and survive. Specifically, it's produced to engender and justify a cover line, that good old device used by glossy magazines to stand out on newsstands. In this case, the cover line reads, "The #1 Happiness Secret You Might Be Missing," and the story touts volunteering as a wellspring of contentment.
But it seems that one day cosmetics companies will perhaps start beefing up their own Web sites. When advertisers become content providers, magazines lose ads and finally drop off newsstands. With no newsstands and no covers, there is no need for cover lines; with no cover lines, the story no longer has to be written in the cover-line-justifying way. Headlines on Newser or The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast draw an audience with new kinds of come-ons.
People who work in traditional media ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter or following a recipe from a Mark Bittman video played on a refrigerator that automatically senses what ingredients are missing and texts an order to the grocery store. Then they should think about what content suits the new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/medium08.php
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1 comments:
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