Kurt Anderson has an interesting article on the Post-Russert Era at New York Magazine today. Some of the most salient paragraphs:

Until the mid-nineties, the pages and airtime available for reporting and explaining the news were scarce and precious, and middle-of-the-road high sobriety was the default mode for American journalism; to devote more than a tiny fraction of one’s mass-media platform to explicit opinion-mongering or mischief-making was literally unthinkable. But after cable TV and the Internet mooted that scarcity, attitude-laden takes on the news were permitted to propagate madly. The blithe post–Cold War unseriousness of the nineties helped as well. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, as The Daily Show had just started to achieve serious cultural traction and Fox News was about to overtake CNN in the ratings, the new paradigm had become unstoppable. Today, the strictly humorless big-time pundits—Paul Krugman, Charles Krauthammer—are the outliers. And so, perversely, thanks to modern technology, America has returned to its nineteenth-century roots: political discourse as entertainment, and almost everybody, from know-it-alls to wiseacres, mouthing off around the cracker barrel.

The commentariat has never been larger. But for all the new pundits, my hunch is that it possesses no more aggregate power than it did in the past. Instead, the same pie has been cut into smaller slices, with many more people scrambling to claim their little piece of visibility and influence. It’s a version of Warhol’s twisted insight, twisted a little more: In today’s commentariat, everyone is famous not for fifteen minutes but across fifteen micrometers of the bit of the celebrity bandwidth reserved for journalists.

What does this mean for the progressive media? Well, clearly we’re up against not only the dog-fight among the “mainstream” media to get attention, we’re up against each other as we seek to find a foothold in this new media world–from our celebrity journalists (that can be placed, linked to, talked about in the progressive, “mainstream” and conservative media world, to actually producing media that’s going to get placed, linked to, talked about–you get my picture. It’s also not just about what’s the click-through rates on our articles, how high the traffic is on our web sites (although it doesn’t hurt)–it’s about WHO is reading, watching and listening to our media. Who are we trying to mobilize/inform? Who are we trying to influence? Targeting our audience (or intended audiences) becomes harder and harder as the landscape becomes more and more saturated with more media and more systems to deliver media.

I’m just going to say it. The individual efforts of the progressive media are crucial. Everyone (well, mostly everyone) is hitting a particular sweet spot for their audience. Everyone can claim they are producing media that no one else is doing. For the most part, that’s true. But that’s not enough. The audiences are too small. The long-lasting impact is too disparate. It’s hard (I know from experience) to look beyond the daily survival of your media organization. But it’s time to get more collaborative and creative with our thinking in terms of partnerships and organized strategies.

We are not going to do this with the same old mentalities. I think we need to start applying some of the principles of grassroots organizing (ongoing campaigns, targets, strategic communiciations, alliance building, getting our hands dirty) to the media system. I think this will have have an impact on how we’re structuring and distributing the media as well as how we engage with our audiences (who now in my mind, are fellow media makers.) I think the basic tenets and principles of journalism will and should survive. In other words, while the internal organs will remain the same, the face needs some major plastic surgery. (Does that analogy make sense? I’ll keep working on it.)

Sue Cross, Senior Vice President of Global New Media and U.S. Print and Broadcast Markets The Associated Press gave a speech at Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication on Monday.  Online Journalism Review has the report.

Here are some good highlights.

Cross cited The Washington Post, The Tyee [EDITOR’S NOTE: The Tyee is one of The Media Consortium’s great allies from Canada] and Hip Hop Caucus as examples of journalism’s proven appeal creativity, social media and aggregation. Ink and paper may be dying, she said, but the newspaper is not. At least not in the short-term.

“It’s allowing people to personalize the Post,” said Cross as she demonstrated the newspaper’s new Facebook widget. “It’s a light, just kind of fun application. At the same time, the Post isn’t giving up for a minute being an authoritative force of political coverage. The Post puts incredible resources and incredible dedication into very expensive, very insightful reporting…So I think this idea of in-depth reporting and text reporting, as we’ve seen from the Post, it may take different shapes, it may be mixed up, but it’s not going to go away. Still a very important piece of the future.

“You’ll see a fair amount of blogs saying people don’t care about news anymore. Young people don’t care about news. First of all, common sense says it’s nonsense. And the research also tends to say it’s nonsense. On the contrary, I would argue we’re in really the biggest media explosion in history. You can’t get in a cab without seeing a window with news on it. You cannot get in an elevator without seeing a news ticker. You can’t open your cell phone, you can’t go to your e-mail without seeing news headlines. That represents a voracious appetite. Those would not be there unless people wanted them. So I see the interest in news surging, and that’s a very good thing.”

On Advocacy and Journalism:

On Financing Journalism:

The whole article is a really good read.  I highly suggest you take a look.

Over at the Center for Social Media’s site, I’ve detailed a number of ways that striking writers and their allies are using Web 2.0 tools to make their case against the studios. Not just another “add technology and stir” story, the strike is revealing how user-generated media has begun to persistently replace some of the functions that progressive and independent media served in the past.

In a print and broadcast world, media and labor activists would have been banging their heads against the blockade, complaining bitterly about the lack (or bias) of coverage. Alternative newsweeklies, independent magazines, community radio stations and labor publications would have picked up the slack, generally reaching only a niche audience. Now, activists just bypass those outlets, generating their own media, which in turn sparks both alternative and mainstream coverage and commentary. Nonprofits and advocacy groups serve as their own publishers and filmmakers, pumping content out on the Web that is quoted, repurposed and attached to calls for action. Buzz no longer just just jumps up or dies; it builds and cycles, sometimes resurfacing unexpectedly.

Where does this shift leave progressive media-makers? What roles can independent political projects effectively play in tandem with or addition to user-generated media? That’s what Tracy and I hope to discover as we continue our book research. Stay tuned!

She writes:

So, you may be thinking, who needs writers anyway? The truth is, no one needs any particular writer, just as no one needs any particular auto worker, stagehand, or janitor. But take us all away and TV’s funny men will be struck mute, soap opera actors will be reduced to sighing and grunting, CNN anchors will have to fill the whole hour with chit chat about the weather, all greeting cards will be blank. Newspapers will consist of advertisements and movie listings; the Web will collapse into YouTube. A sad, bewildered, silence will come over the land.

more

The recent announcement that the FCC is pushing up a vote on media ownership in local markets to mid-December has sent the media reform movement into overdrive.

A related piece from the Publish2 Blog, “The New Media Consolidation,” might explain some of the urgency of commercial media owners to grab up new outlets. It notes in part:

What Google discovered was that consolidating all of the search behavior on the web is actually a form a media consolidation. It used to be that the content and the distribution were one and the same — newspapers, magazines, TV networks, etc. — Google was the first media company to successfully arbitrage the separation of content from distribution.

But search is only half of the equation. Search has consolidated the allocation of attention for people who know, generally or specifically, what they are looking for. The other half of the attention allocation equation for media is people who don’t know what they are looking for — they just want to know what’s NEW. I may be interested in technology, or celebrity gossip, or foreign affairs, but I’m not looking for anything in particular. I just want the news.

This is why the online news market is heating up. This is why Google has started to develop the Google News product after letting it run on automatic pilot for so many years. This is why Digg has captured everyone’s imagination — it has the attention allocation power of search, but applied to news.

But there’s a problem with these two approaches to media consolidation — they remain separate.

In one corner you’ve got all of the capacity to create content, from traditional media brand networks to citizen media consolidators, all the way down the long tail to independent blog publishers.

In the other corner you have the aggregators, from search to audience-powered social news, increasingly dominating how attention gets allocated to all of this content.

It seems unlikely that the the big media players are going to be content with half the pie.

And so this separation is starting to dissolve, e.g. Conde Nast acquires Reddit, Google starts hosting news wire content, Forbes acquires Clipmarks, Digg hosts massive comment threads that dwarf what you find on the original content items.

This is where consolidation converges, where content creation meets attention allocation — new media companies are realizing that they have to do both.

This is why, as Jeff Chester notes in a recent Nation article, the idea the the Web can serve as an antidote to consolidation is naive at best. “The growing consolidation at the core of the digital media business, ultimately will result in a handful of companies controlling the revenues for all of online media–blogs, social networks, search engines, mobile communication and (especially) news and information sites. This should be of concern, especially to progressive idealists who hoped that the Internet could pose a challenge to the ‘old’ media monopoly.”

Here’s my point: both of these versions of consolidation are largely bypassing the progressive media sector. While individual progressive media projects have benefitted from traffic driven to them via search engines, digg, etc., legacy progressive media outlets have had limited success in either penetrating the ranks of consolidated commercial media or partnering with the digital powerbrokers. There’s work to be done.

Check out this month’s In These Times for my editorial contrasting this year’s YearlyKos conference to the recent Journalism That Matters gathering in DC. A snippet:

The bloggers and readers at the YearlyKos conference don’t all agree on politics or tactics—their approaches range from investigative journalism to rhetorical Molotov-throwing. They don’t always know if they’re practicing journalism—and don’t care. They do know that the public demands accountability and truth-telling from media and government alike.