Lexington, KY - The news media is at a crossroads like never before. In the past, newspapers had to adjust to radio, then radio and newspapers had to adjust to TV. More recently, all three have had to adjust to the new medium created by the Internet. But unlike any other advances in the distribution of information, this new technology has broken down any and all barriers to entering the news game.
Representatives from each form of media were on hand for a Lexington Forum panel discussion about the change these developments have brought and how the way the masses find and use the news media can, should and will continue to change over time.
As creator of the news aggregator site FARK.com, Drew Curtis is considered somewhat of a dinosaur in the new media, as his internationally known site is approaching its 10th birthday of lambasting the inane stories that seep into "the news."
While a hot item on the Web is to display news by what is most popular among site visitors - - known as social news - - Curtis banished this model from FARK shortly after introducing it.
"You'd think that with what I do that I'd be a real proponent of social news online," Curtis said to the Forum. "But I actually hate it, believe it or not. The current Web 2.0 is probably going in the wrong direction; if you let the monkeys with the typewriters pick the news that you're supposed to be looking at, you end up with some really strange results. For example on Digg.com, the pure social news site where you can vote stories up and down, the No. 1 story of all time is a video of puppies Ö This is what you end up with when you let people [control your content]."
What Curtis advocates for new media is the same role stressed by panelists Tom Eblen, columnist and former managing editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, and Tom Martin, former radio newsman and current Business Lexington editor-in-chief: good editing.
"At the end of the day you just have to have someone sitting there going 'that's just dumb, that shouldn't be there,'" Curtis said.
In traditional media, Martin said, the people who distribute the news make a point of knowing their audience.
"One of the jobs of an editor is to know his readers, viewers or listeners and to be involved in the community to the extent that you're basically conducting intel constantly," Martin said. "You're understanding the forces that work in your community. As an extension of that you're learning what's of interest to your community, what's important to your community."
Eblen sees the era of big media companies coming to an end as people like Curtis are drawn to a model similar to that followed by newspapers did in the early and mid part of the 20th Century.
"Going forward, I think that you're going to see a lot fewer big media companies because in the new age, big media doesn't work. It is the guys like Drew who put together a small company in their house, it's going to be so decentralized and you're going to see a real return to locally owned media and smaller media that will be a lot better in touch with their community.
"If you look at the corporate ownership of media, more than anything it has made them stupid ÖWhat you saw though in the 1960s when a lot of newspapers left family ownership Ö the public companies got invested in these growth models that Wall Street requires. They were afraid to take chances and you saw the big newspaper companies and all the big media companies really completely blow the internet. ... [former Herald-Leader parent company and now dissolved Knight Ridder] completely bungled their approach for getting on the Internet and we still suffer for it."
News on the Internet might be the wave of the future for local broadcasters, veteran TV newsman and Channel 36 evening anchor Tom Kenny told the Forum. "I don't know that we may be that far away from us not doing local news on TV anymore, all of our newscasts may be Online. And to compound that, we keep getting studies that show your attention span is getting shorter, shorter and shorter. Now if we don't grab you within the first 12 seconds, you're gone," Kenny said. All that, he said, has led to the "if it bleeds it leads" mentality that local TV news gets pegged with, leading to a high focus on stories that are sensational (and oftentimes gory). Without capturing a viewer's attention, there is no one to whom to advertise once the commercial break comes around. "We're going to have to start giving away free beer to get you to watch our local news," Kenny joked.
But that has proven to be the biggest conundrum for media companies, according to the panelists. As news shifts to the Web, advertising dollars go away from the original product, but as of yet there has not been a reliable way to transfer ad revenue to the net.
Advertisers pay for an ad in an actual magazine knowing people will pass by it while leafing through to finish articles, but that doesn't work Online where people will just read what articles catches them on the main page, Curtis said. "The net result of that is massive revenue shortfall. That's going to be an issue that has to be addressed because the model needs to change to something else. I don't know what it is, but the main problem you have with media buyers is that they're idiots. They really don't know what they want, they have no idea, they're not paid to innovate and they're not interested in hearing your ideas. So things tend to move very slowly in that arena and I don't expect that to change soon."
Curtis doesn't see the current system of basing ad revenue on page views surviving because the sites with the most page views don't have a long enough average-time-spent-on-page to even come close to processing an ad.
The next Forum breakfast meeting is scheduled for 7:30 a.m. , January 8, 2009 at Annette's City Cafe and Events Center, 431 Old Vine Street. The organization will hold its annual Forum at Noon meeting on Jan. 27 in the Hyatt's Patterson Ballroom, presenting Mayor Jim Newberry's State of the Merged Government Address. The lunch is open to members and the public at large. Tickets are $35 members, $40 non-members, $350 for a table of ten.