I’ve given once, but I’ll give again – by matching anyone who hasn’t yet donated – up to $50!

Just high-five me in the comments and I’ll back my little red wagon full of coins up to the Emptywheel Blogging Syndicate receiving dock…

We can do this!

And now folks still insist their news be in the form of ink spread on dead trees. After all, it’s always been like that.

But it isn’t just content but presentation where the MSM fail. The Huffington Post has been successful although it’s kind of light weight and glitzy. Dailykos has been successful too although it is often limited by traditional partisan affiliations. But quite obviously both of these give readers something that they want. They are addressing the wants of an audience. When was the last time you ever heard the MSM talk about its audience? Not numbers but who it is they are trying to reach? That I think is the point. The media no longer know who they want to reach or how to reach them. As a result, that audience is looking for alternatives and it is increasingly finding them on the internet.

It doesn’t hurt that many of these sell themselves as free, even if this really isn’t the case. If you look at the cost of computers, network connections, portals, etc., the internet is not free. In fact, it can be fairly expensive. But the difference is that now it is not the NYT or Boston Globe that is telling you what you need to know and doing a very poor job of it, it is you who are calling the shots, and maybe you like glitz or the Democratic line or something else but those are your choices, good or bad. The MSM thought they had a captive audience. They were wrong. The evidence is that they have yet to internalize that lesson.

1. It is true that 24 cable news and the internet have made much of what newspapers cover stale. However, that should have been a wake up call years ago for the papers to devote more reporting on stories that no one else is doing. Some stories require timely/newsbreaking coverage (e.g. a bombing) that is best served by tv but there are plenty of stories that either do not require that kind of immediate time frame(e.g. Harman’s wiretapping story) or mainstream stories that warrant in-depth analysis (Marcy’s footnote discovery by doing real reporting; how many talking heads had actually read any of the memos or reports they covered?). Too many tv news stories are the equivalent of hit-and-run: sound bite today, forgotten tomorrow.

Speaking of hit-and-run stories, what’s going on with Meirs/Rove/Card testimony?

2. I think one of the posters above was on to something. I think the MSM has always been a bit ‘establishment’. I was reading a book over the summer about the WPA theater program, and there was plenty of anti-FDR bias in the main stream news accounts.

I know there are many who long wistfully for the days of Cronkite/Mudd/Reasoner, but I wonder if they aren’t just being nostalgic for something that was never as substantive as they imagine. I’d like to watch some old telecasts of nightly news to see how early Watergate or Vietname was covered.

With that you get a new Kindle DX. (Retail $489, probably work a deal with Bezos sub $400 per) but no paper delivery.

Then work a deal with Amazon that every purchase made through a NYT subscriber, 1% is given to the Times.

You’re right, the MSM has always been pro-establishment. You might recall that for a long time the coverage of the Civil Rights Movement was from the perspective of law enforcement. People were going out and being disruptive and when trouble found them they were getting what they deserved. It wasn’t until the Birmingham church bombings in ‘63 that the narrative (slowly) began to change.

(I want to say to them, Um, no, morons, Google is marketing your content for you at a very reasonable price, accessing the market you’d otherwise lose altogether…)