Bad News & Sex
Liquid Age #1
Alexa Schirtzinger’s assessment of news and journalism focuses primarily on channels and distribution. Quoting a friend, she uses the term pipes:
1. ‘Distribution—not content or even audience—is the real product.’
2. ‘The pipe itself is the product. We have to build a new pipe.’
It may help to remember the much used and abused quote of Marshall McLuhan, ‘the medium is the message’. It aims deeper in its impact and implications, and that is what I want to suggest. So far, the discourse has been restricted to a technical assessment and its economical implications: ‘How can we continue our business under the condition of digital warfare and technologies?’
The business itself — news and journalism — is not under consideration for alternative approaches beyond crowd sourcing and data mining. The hipper the professionals want to appear, the more technological their discourse. Data driven journalism strikes me as cold and irrelevant. What do I care about the results of polls in real time, about surveys on the spurious whims and moods of anonymous crowds whom I rarely ever have been in contact with? As for those I am in contact with, I don’t need surveys to tell me about their mood and inclinations …
News are about reality and society. The audience as well as the journalists reporting on reality are members and actors of the society which is the subject matter of news. The only real time reporting or responses I care about concern answers, sources, solutions on whatever unexpected issues arise from my dealing with reality. I am a particle of the spongy dark masses that make up reality and which the experts are so eager to sound with their technological tools. A business and product that meets my needs and, if possible, exceeds my expectations, would make me a devout customer of the providers and of the platform where I can access the product in whatever way I may want …
The pipe as channels of distribution does not need to be re-invented. The web is there and waiting to be used to the best of its enormous potentials. Yes, the Obama administration, in happy co-operation with corporations of big old media and carriers has just killed the internet as we knew it and have come to rely on. Most likely this will be a long and hard battle with hopefully many guerilla and ninja activities. The Apocalypse Now Revisited. Maybe we have been asking for it. Too comfortable and complacent with our routines. Eventually even big corporations and carriers will feel the hurt. Despite their supercilious self-delusion, they are businesses and depend on meeting their customers’ needs. We have barely begun grasping the web’s potentials, and those who try to play the game by the old rules of control and consumption are the dinosaurs of a dying age and civilization …
Distribution, however, is not the product. In case the pipe breaks, the demand still exists, and it will find ways and answers, read: the product we crave. People will want to know what happened and how to fix it. The less reality works, the more urgent the demand for answers. The answer is the product, and it will always find those who are in need of it. For the professionals to be successful, they need to be part of the reality they report on and are selling as a product. This is not a matter of data sourcing and mining, but of personal involvement in the kind of reality we inhabit as customers …
Technology may be a tool, but the success of my product and business depends on the human factor beyond its scientific analysis. The customer being king means that I have to respond as a human being and at eye level. A successful business model for news and journalism may be found in making both ends meet: the demand for news that tend to be bad, and the need to make money on what is not very attractive. How to dress up bad news as sex and make us salivate, craving more of the product?
