It’s not news that the media
landscape is changing rapidly. Major consolidations of newspaper and broadcast
ownership, the reliance on the internet for news: what will we end up with? And
what impact will the changes have on democracy?
Among the writers exploring
those questions is New York Times media
critic David Carr. A veteran of the alternative press (he edited alt-weeklies
in Minneapolis and Washington, DC), Carr writes the Times‘ first-ever blog, Carpetbagger, in addition to his job as the
paper’s media scribe. Carr — who’d written media columns for Washington’s City Paper and Twin Cities Reader — says he
almost passed on the chance to be a media columnist with the Times.
“Although I was reluctant at
first, because I thought I was pretty much done with media, I eventually came
around,” he says. “And I’m glad I did, because the sky actually is falling
right now, and it’s fun and interesting and scary all at the same time to watch
the ways in which media are atomizing and becoming commoditized.”
Media consolidation has even
reached the world of alternative journalism. Late last year, the two biggest
alt-weekly chains, the Phoenix-based New Times and Village Voice Media,
announced they were merging to form a mammoth (by alt-press standards, at
least) new chain of weeklies.
Issues like these will be on
the bill of fare February 15, when Carr speaks at SUNY Brockport’s downtown
MetroCenter, and he discussed some of them in a recent interview. Here’s what
he had to say:
On the role of media in a democracy:
Part of the miracle of
American democracy has always been based on the robust press, and I think that
the press — regardless of what platform you’re speaking of — has been able
to bring accountability at certain points in the nation’s history that were
absolutely critical. Whether it’s the Teapot Dome scandal
or Watergate or the nexus of money and politics, I think that you can’t really
have a great democracy without having a great or at least good press.
On how technology will affect newsgathering and news
consumption:
I think people assume that,
“Oh, we’ll be able to use the web to assemble a portrait of the world beyond
our town,” and the fact is that Google News or whatever RSS feeder you’ve got,
most of it is just annotating coverage. Somebody has to make phone calls
somewhere in order for news to function.
Where are the data inputs
coming from? Where is the information coming from? In other words, who is
making the phone calls? Who is sending the emails? You cannot have a robust
discourse without a database of current information. And if the information
that’s being culled through is just government-issued data without a critical
eye or editing, then you’re going to end up with a fairly dumb republic.
There’s a conceit that young
people get their news from the Jon Stewart show or get their news from the web,
but there was a study not long ago at Ball State, and if you’re talking, say,
18 to 24, young people just don’t get their news. That’s all there is to it.
They don’t have a strong interest in it. So there you have a very attractive
advertising demographic where there’s no upside in serving them with that kind
of information, because they have no interest or need. There’s not much news on
a Playstation, man.
On Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (whose free
classifieds seem to have everyone in media complaining):
He’s a smart guy and a
person who is true to his values, and he believes that what he’s doing is good
for both media and democracy.
I talked to him a couple of
weeks ago, and he struck me as a very sincere person. Classifieds are bedrock
revenues that don’t change much. For weeklies and dailies, they’ve always sort
of been there. And he’s really going at a core franchise. I think he represents
a significant threat to papers like yours. I was out with Michael Lacey last
night, the New Times guy who just
bought the Village Voice, and they
certainly are paying attention to what he’s doing.
On the Village
Voice-New Times merger:
Well, I’m a fan of the New Times version of newspapering. They
do very robust, city-oriented coverage that I think is a force for good, or at
least accountability in the cities that they do them in. So I’m not up in arms
about the fact that they bought that paper, I don’t think the Village Voice is anywhere near the paper
it once was.
The Village Voice is fairly tendentious in its coverage and is very
interested in “progressive” sorts of things. And you know what? I newspapered
in WashingtonDC at the Washington
City Paper, which was nothing but Democrats and allegedly progressive
Democrats, and the city was a complete basket case. So how you gonna root for
that? It tends to rub out ideological approaches to coverage.
Newspapers should be in
favor of competence. That’s what they should root for. And I think that to the
degree that newspapers or the media in general are perceived as being down on
this administration, a lot of it is less about policy and more about execution.
I mean, these guys seem to like war pretty well, and they’re not very good at
it. If you’re going to be aggressive, there’s a lot of execution risks that
goes with that, and it behooves them to go and plan well and give our folks the
equipment they need to do the job they’ve been asked to do. I think that’s
where a lot the sort of negative coverage has popped up.
On the future of alternative journalism:
I think that there’s sort of
a multi-part thread, in that you’ve chosen to work in printed media, but a lot
of the more talented young people involved in media and in journalism are heading
toward the web. You need to keep refreshing that sort of children’s crusade of
talented young reporters to make alternative newspapers vital.
Some weeklies have done a
really good job with their websites: the Weekly
Dig in Boston… MinneapolisCity Pages has had a robust, very interactive web site for a
while. Some people are doing a better job of putting their brand into digital
realms than others.
Just look at some of the
fundamental assets of alternative journalism: it’s
lippy discourse plus culturally literate recommendations plus listings. That
list of assets has become somewhat unbundled and is available on the web, and
it’s far more searchable in that form.
If you want to read some
smarty-pants writing, you don’t have to go down to the coffee shop and get the
weekly. Just open up Google and type in smarty pants, and it’ll pop up
everywhere.
Now that consumers can time
and platform shift, I think media companies have to be very, very nimble in
terms of making their product available in the way that people want it.
And there are many large
stories that are being covered in significant ways: the fact that significant
parts of our manufacturing infrastructure are moving offshore, and now some of
our intellectual infrastructure, software infrastructure is moving offshore.
I do think that people are
going to realize, Well, we have to be in the business
of something; we can’t just give the world Jennifer Lopez and King Kong and
expect that to fuel an economy of our size.
One of my 17-year-old
daughters asked me not long ago: “Do you think that China’s going to end up running the world while I’m
alive?” And I said, “Yeah, I think there’s a pretty good chance of it.” And I’m
pretty sure she didn’t get that off of MySpace.
So as the stakes of the
story increase, I think that people might reindex into news. When people are
working off their part of affinity groups in MySpace, or they’re working off
RSS where they’re getting information pushed to their desktop, they tend to
sort of self-select into non-news categories. And you have to find a way to
break through that.
David Carr speaks on “The
Role of Media in Strengthening Democracy” at 7 p.m. February 15 at SUNY Brockport’s MetroCenter, 55 St. Paul Street, downtown Rochester. The event is free and open to the public.
www.brockport.edu.
This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2006.
