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.)
