The Los Angeles Times this week is running a “Dust-Up” series this week with Glenn Reynolds and Robert McChesney debating the future of media.
McChesney is a communications professor at the University of Illinois. He also co-founded Free Press http://www.freepress.net/, a media reform organization that promotes “diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications.” Reynolds is the creator of instapundit.com and a law professor at the University of Tennessee.
Their Wednesday debate headlined “
Where’s the paper?” caught my eye because it focuses on the future of newspapers, specifically.
Reynolds uses the debate to vent some frustration at inept newspaper management. He writes, “I guess I'd be more willing to buy the notion that newspapers' decline is the result of impersonal and implacable economic forces, rather than miserable management, if I saw much evidence that newspapers and broadcasters were even trying to deal with the problem seriously. Instead, they're mostly in denial.”
To be fair, he does back off a bit at the end, writing “That's not quite fair—some papers are trying, and my own local paper, the Knoxville News-Sentinel, is beginning to do a lot with web content and web video.”
Reynolds continues, “But it's mostly true. Like most bloggers, I don't hate Big Media, any more than baseball fans kvetching about their team's lousy performance hate baseball. I just look at what's going on and wonder: Can't anybody here play this game?”
McChesney is a bit more forgiving, but he’s also realistic. He started with a story about a book publisher who ran a contest among his employees on when the book industry would go all-digital. The book publisher predicted 2002. Clearly, he was wrong.
“I mention this story because while we are all captivated by the digital revolution, we should not lose our perspective. It is true that all media are gravitating toward digital standards, but it will not happen evenly across all media sectors or overnight. What happened in this intervening period will determine where we end up,” McChesney writes.