Big stupid media … and little smart media

It's Personal, On Writing (and/or Media) Comments (0)

I can get far more revved up about the subject of the news media than most people, though I’m not like most people who really pop their buttons about it — you know, like the ones who think that the news media is all part of a big, lib-er-uhl conspiracy (except for Fox) and also the ones who think it is, increasingly, a big fascist corporate monolith.

Because those who don’t know what they’re talking about are very annoying to those of us who do. I say that with some tempered arrogance. I have worked in the news media for some 24 years now, both in its traditional mainstream heart and out at the fringes of its awareness. And I have had a much better view of how it has all gone wrong than most people.

Back in 1995, I wrote something about the coming of the Internet and how it was a big problem for the mainstream media. I had already found out, in my last daily newspaper job, just what a challenge the Internet was going to be. At The News-Times in Danbury, Conn., I had been instrumental in setting up a Bulletin Board Service (BBS) as part of the paper’s initial foray into going online. The publisher, a pretty farsighted guy, put me up to it. The managing editor suffered from another vision. (He also didn’t like me much for several reasons, at least one of which was pretty valid, but I digress.) I got mowed down in a crossfire, having not learned yet about keeping my head down when the shooting starts.

Anyway, for years, that was the way it went in a lot of newspaper and TV and radio newsrooms. The online road led to both the Grail and to the deepest Pit in Hell, and newsrooms mostly stood in the middle of the road and argued about it. They’re still arguing about it. Think about it for a second — if television and radio and newspaper companies had grasped what was going on with the Internet early on, and said “Whoa, this is going to be expensive, but we have to do it, because this is how we’re going to be delivering our product from now on, starting soon” … well, if that had happened, it would not be Google and Yahoo and even Microsoft and Apple bringing you your news, with all the actual news organizations saying “Uh, hey. Wait just a darned minute.” They (the media) wanted the Internet delivery system handed to them, with a built-in 20-40 percent profit margin, the kind they got used to and fat on in the 1980s and 1990s while they were consolidated under corporate ownership and cut costs. Newsrooms were treated as a “cost,” not as the producer of the product and the reason for existing. The media mostly still does a horrible job with monetizing their archives of local news. As organizations, they mostly don’t know what they’re doing with the Internet, even today.

Which brings me around to what I though I was going to write about in the first place: my local media. I moved to Massachusetts just a few months ago and among the peripheral changes I’ve gone through has been … my media. Different papers. Reprogramming my radio buttons, finding new filters for what makes it into my brain, etc. And, for the most part, I’m pleasantly surprised. The Hampshire Gazette, the local daily newspaper, is better than I am used to in Connecticut. I’m not a daily subscriber — I pick up the paper once or twice a week at a newsstand — and they don’t know what they’re doing online, and I hear moans and groans about the local coverage and, no it is not a *great* paper, that I can tell. But there are very few small papers that would meet my standard for “great.” You get great local journalism every once in a while when, for a time, you get a collection of extraordinary talent at a local paper. It happens but usually doesn’t last that long, because local media usually can’t afford to keep extraordinary talent, or at least thinks it can’t afford to.

Anyway, people around here ought to understand that they are lucky to have a local daily paper at all — a lot of papers just like the Gazette have gotten closed down or bought up and rolled into sections of bigger papers (like the Springfield one, for example.) You don’t have any idea of how the closing of a daily newspaper affects a community unless you’ve watched it happen, and I have. And though I don’t know the history or insides of the Gazette, I’d be willing to bet that the Pioneer Valley has come closer to losing the paper in the past than I know. I sure don’t take it as a given.

Besides that — the Valley Advocate rocks, and no one should take that for given, either, because I do know the history and the story there. And WHMP in the morning really is the most pleasant surprise of all. Again, most communities this size don’t have community commercial radio anymore, unless it’s from a college station. There’s PBS, of course … but I like to encourage commercial, liberal talk radio. I miss Colin McEnroe on WTIC AM out of Hartford in the afternoon. Can’t they point their antenna just a little more north? Maybe it’s the proximity of Mt. Tom, which should still have a ski area but does not.

None of them know what to do with the Internet, (except maybe Colin) but, taken together, it’s a more vital local news scene than I was expecting.