Each month in In These Times, Tracy Van Slyke and I write a short column on developments in media and activism. I’m posting these all here as a supplement to this site.

From the January 2006 issue:

Whither the News?

Have we reached the end of journalism as we know it?

In early December, as news broke that the Bush administration was placing pro-war stories in the Iraqi press, the Tribune Company announced a round of deep staff cuts at several major newspapers. In response, MoveOn Media Action launched a localized petition drive, criticizing the company for abandoning “its responsibility to deliver strong watchdog journalism to the public” and then hand delivered 45,000 signatures to the company’s CEO.

But staff cuts are just a small part of the picture, writes Michael Massing in a two-part series in the New York Review of Books. Massing, a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, takes readers on a tour of the monomaniacal world of right-wing punditry, a strident force that has “contributed to a siege mentality among journalists.” Cowed by corporate owners, readers screaming “bias” and their own class interests, journalists have betrayed themselves, he writes. “Of all the internal problems confronting the press, the reluctance to venture into politically sensitive matters, to report disturbing truths that might unsettle and provoke, remains by far the most troubling.”

Media 2.0

As traditional journalism falters, a shake-up in media distribution methods and changes in consumption patterns is forcing media makers to look to new models. According to “The Making of the New Powers That Be,” a report from the progressive think tank New Politics Institute (NPI), these shifts will radically transform political communication. “Anyone with any connection to politics needs to pay close attention to the changes taking place in the media world today,” writes NPI fellow Peter Leyden. “If you change the way you reach audiences and consumers, then it changes the way you reach citizens and voters too.”

NPI claims that this transformation is based on several large-scale societal shifts, including the rise of new distribution channels such as high-bandwidth Internet, the emergence of cheaper technologies that allow people to create their own media, and the displacement of the Boomers by the rising “Millennial Generation.” Widespread access to high-speed video and audio in particular will force media outlets, advertisers and corporations to rethink traditional text-based content as audiences come to expect “interactive, on demand, tailored media.” The report is available at the NPI Web site.