Tina Brown’s March Into Media Quicksand
Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Tina Brown, famed British bluepenciler who took Manhattan by storm yo some years back, takes a whipping in Michael Wolff’s USA Today Media column of Monday, Sept. 17, 2012 (Is There A Place For Tina Brown?. Doyen of the old media, now on her last editorial legs, immersed in a merciless fight to the death to save Newsweek, all thoughts that come to mind about Ms. Brown after reading the piece.
Lawdy, lawdy, Ms. Tina sure do give it her all though, Wolff notes.
Newsweek may be a dying media beast, and the Daily Beast may be a wounded beast, but Brown is still fighting the good fight for traditional, e.g. quality, journalism, argues Wolff.
He makes a good point.
Another Time, Another Place
No use pining for the good old days of journalistic largesse, with its giants of the trade — too numerous and mind-numbing to mention by name. Those days are good and gone, kaput, faded as an old Soviet Red Star flag. In their place, sheer chaos, punctuated by the screams of the drowning. (Have you heard the one about how all the old-time journos are snarfing up those penny-per-pound article-writing jobs advertised so freely – and paying about the same — on freelance writer sites across the Internet? Not happening, so far as I can tell. Work-at-home eighth-graders can do a lot of that type of writing, and the pay will just about equate to what they would have got decades ago by taking on a paperboy job.)
Where Have All The Must-Reads Gone?
Well here’s some ways the media has changed:
- New York Magazine once was a must read, no matter where you lived. (Assuming you worked in the advertising and PR fields.)
- Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report were the holy triumvirate of U.S. news weeklies. Get a placement in one of those pubs and you were a star of incredible proportions.
- Reading the Village Voice was to wallow weekly in the byzantine complexities of New York City municipal government, a monstrous operation that made for fascinating reading even in Far Stuckaway, North Dakota. Oh I know, nobody out in the hinterland really cared who was bribing who in the Big Apple – most of us just assumed everybody in New York was on the take — but it was like a soap opera for political junkies and conspiracy theorists. And the Voice personal ads, in that long-ago age of innocence, were more aimed at people wanting to find Mr. or Mrs. Goodbar, rather than a well, you know, short-term relationship of a more commercial nature. I always read the damned Voice — buying it off the late-lamented Shinder’s Newsstand on Hennepin Avenue — because I did so much media work in New York City and felt it gave me an edge to know what was up in the city. (And yes, I know there could be dire consequences to those engaged in the search for Mr. Goodbar as Diane Keaton’s character discovered in the movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Life in the age of The Personals was not always fun and games either.)
I could go on, but what’s the point? The media world has changed, long live the Big Media Age, and yet Tina Brown fights on, seeking relevancy at a time when very few people could name you even one major print media journalist. Go ahead. Throw some names out there. Niall Ferguson? How many folks in Peoria would know a Niall from a Ned Ferguson? What about Michael Wolff? Even Dear Abby’s not who or what she used to be.
When Newspapers Ruled
Oddly enough, just yesterday I was researching some material out of some really old back copies of the Minneapolis Tribune — by really old, I mean 1910-22 — and I was floored by how much stuff the newspaper covered. I mean, there were stories from all over the place, mostly wire-service, as if people back then were really interested in what was happening in other parts of the world. The Tribune even had a writer who went on a tour of Europe after the Great War and wrote about it. (McNally was his name, and he apparently did not much like the food they served visiting journalists, not quite up to snuff, although plentiful, even though vast numbers of the post-war population in Europe lived on the edge of starvation. At least one thing has not changed all these years later – food better be good, no matter whether it’s for a gathering of traditional journos or a bunch of new media upstarts pawing away at their smartphones.)
So we return once more to the fate of Tina Brown, exemplar of the old way of doing media, and her seemingly Sisyphean dream of creating a new media juggernaut at Newsweek. Wolff is sanguine, noting that Brown, as a self-confessed technophobe, is probably not ever going to get the new world of digital media right.
And yet, he says, the world as we know it has become a larger media wasteland since the fall of the old media. Now it’s chock-full of look-alike content creation, little of it notable, much of it under-funded, rudderless. The barbarians have over-run the gatekeepers. What’s needed, he argues, is a new Tina Brown for a digital age, someone to put quality, connectivity and profitability back into the journalism world. That’s not such a tall order as it seems. There are plenty of well-qualified writers and journalists about. What’s needed are more venues that can pay for their talents.
(Visit my website too: Big Thunder PR.)
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Print Is Dead, Except It Isn’t
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Rob Cox, a columnist at Reuters.com, notes that “old media” still play an outsized role in the court of public opinion, mainly because of the age of those in charge.
Speaking primarily of print media, Cox says it’s the print media dinosaurs such as Newsweek and Forbes that still get read — and even more importantly, taken seriously — by the pre-digital generations. Since they tend to be the ones in power today, and consequently have the most money, their fealty to the print cause is of major interest to advertisers. Even so grievously wounded a dinosaur as Newsweek is still a force to be reckoned with simply because of this demographic reality, he says.
But as the younger generations, with their pronounced digital biases, move to the forefront of society, true print journalism will disappear. In that scenario, newspapers and magazines have perhaps 10 more years of life left in them. Then not only will trees and the people who love them breathe easier, but the digital takeover of journalism and mass media will be complete.
It’s a most likely scenario, and one I agree with.
Print, The Next Generation: A Custom Job
However, I don’t think it means the end of print media as we know it but rather a morphing into a new era of special interest print publications in which the medium is used to call special attention to issues and other matters of importance to people. Because if there is one thing the digital world is not, it’s unified. And in the end, those with the most money will have the ability to deliver the most message for the buck, meaning they’ll be able to claim digital attention in this new hyper-fragmented world ahead.
<p.Print with its ability to focus attention — if something’s in your face or hand, it’s hard to ignore — will continue to play a role albeit in a more custom-created way.
Here’s a link to Cox’s Reuters column: Print is dead: long live old media.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )New Journalism 101: Slanted Coverage Is Us?
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What about this new journalism that eschews objectivity? It’s not real journalism say some. Journalism is becoming more and more something that is what it is in the eye of the beholder it seems.
The shrill cries against the mainstream media (MSM) — emanating from the farther reaches of all sides of the political spectrum, including the apolitical anarchists — echo throughout the land. People I know on both the left and right are convinced, absolutely convinced, that the so-called mainstream media are comprehensively biased one way or the other.
Even Davy Crockett Knew How To Play The Game
Being in public relations, I can understand their frustrations. Getting your voice heard through the din of the media marketplace is a big problem. But it’s been like that since, what, the invention of the mass media? Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, had a PR agent. The early Ottoman emperors employed their own scribes to write their accounts of their reigns.
More recently, I’ve worked with clients who were absolutely convinced that they could never get a fair shake in the MSM because of A) their political/religious bent; B) their lack of a powerful advertising budget; C) their ethnicity. In all cases, it wasn’t that the MSM was fundamentally opposed to their side of the story. It was that they needed to first figure out what their story was, and then package it properly and pitch it to the appropriate reporters and editors etc. in a timely fashion. And yes, there was an element of “let’s hope for the best,” as there always is when you’re asking someone to do something for you.
I’m not saying that the MSM isn’t ever biased. That’s just not realistic. But in general, if you’ve got a good story to tell, there’s usually a way to get it told through the news media.
Dogs Do It, Editorialists Do It…
Look, it feels good to have a platform to air your views, the bigger the better as Keith Olbermann and every other media commentator with a license to be opinionated knows. (I’m reminded of my pup days in journalism, when one of the newspaper’s grand old editors advised me to keep in mind that writing an editorial was a lot like a dog pissing on its hind legs, it felt so good to the dog that it didn’t care what kind of mess it created.)
But most reporters, and most editors, are still looking for the good story first and foremost within the constraints of whatever particular outlet they happen to be working for at the time. Not to say that bias doesn’t happen. But persistence and some degree of knowing how to package a story, as well as cultivate the media’s attention, still goes a long way in getting information through the gate and into the promised land of MSM news coverage.
And no, the odds are that the media are not going to do a free ad for you. You’ve really got to have news, or at least one heck of a good angle.
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Doug Hovelson Weblog 
At The End Of The Day, We Move Forward No More Forever
Posted on September 20, 2012. Filed under: Media Commentary, Ramblings, Sporting life, Writing | Tags: business writing, business-speak, Clayton Kershaw, cliched writing, cliches, communicating, Don Mattingly, God, grammar, Journalism, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Dodgers, media, psycho-babble, Tim Phillips |
English: Don Mattingly in Dodgers dugout. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Just two words of wisdom for today: Talk Normal*
Case in point:
“What I really want, at the end of the day, is to make sure we do the right thing for Clayton moving forward. I know we’ll do the right thing for him, so that’s not really a concern.” – Don Mattingly, Los Angeles Dodgers manager, speaking about injured pitcher Clayton Kershaw. (Quote from Sept. 18, 2012 Minneapolis Star Tribune, Sports, page C4)
Rewrite (just for our purposes):
“What I really want — and what this organization wants — is what’s best for Clayton.”
Editorial notes:
“Moving forward” – a transition phrase, perhaps once notable for being novel, it now sounds as empty of meaning as “awesome.” Delete with extreme prejudice. (See also: “going forward,” its equally obnoxious sibling.)
“At the end of the day” – what’s with this end of the day stuff? Do the cows come in at the end of the day? Of course they do. Was Rome built in a day? Of course not. Can we not get through one day without hearing someone, somewhere, in a position of somber authority, speaking of their earnest ambition to conclude something of a serious nature by the end of the bloody f’ing day???
No Offense Intended, Don
Sorry, Don Mattingly. I don’t mean to pick on you. I know you mean well. It’s just that, to see two such mindlessly over-used clichéd phrases in the same sentence, for God’s sake, it defies comprehension. It drew my attention, and I took a grammatical hack at it — somewhat like you used to have your fun battering a lazy down-the-middle fastball back in the day.
Editor’s note:
“Back in the day” – yadda, yadda, yadda, sounds like an early Jersey Boy phrase that went viral via some TV cop show outa New York and now passes for virile man-talk. Backinnaday ya know. Pack it in, back-in-the-day sayers. It’s lost most of the street smart cred that it had back in whatever day it slunk out of.
So, at the end of the day here, let’s quit embracing cliché-talk in our speech, okay?
Editor’s note:
“Embracing” — a psycho-babble-ish distortion of a perfectly good word — to embrace, to clasp in the arms. Now used with great unrestraint to show affinity, as in “she embraces the culture,” or “the author embraces the poor, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the forgotten and the immoderate.” If those are the author’s people, so be it. Actually, it’s not so far-fetched to assume that a writer of the depths, such as a Dostoyevsky, actually does emotionally embrace the lives of some such as the Russian dispossessed, as he did with great feeling and insight. Not to banish non-physical/romantic references of embracing from the vocabulary, then, but to urge more judicious use of the word at minimum. (Note: no mention of being more judicious going forward!) Gandhi may well have embraced all of humanity. Most people have a hard enough time embracing close family members, much less the multitudinous masses. (No embracing on the job. That goes without saying.)
Well, then. That puts a period to the cliché problem for now.
* A nod to Tim Phillips, author of Talk Normal, Stop The Business Speak, Jargon and Waffle, published in 2011 by Kogan Page Limited, an excellent book in which the author argues that people are more effective when they just talk like normal people do.
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