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April 14, 2005
TT: Memo from Cassandra
No matter what you think of Rupert Murdoch, you need to read the speech he gave yesterday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Jeff Jarvis has posted a fileted version, plus a link to the full text. Some pertinent excerpts:We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from....
What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don't want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don't want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what's important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don't want news presented as gospel.
Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle....
In the face of this revolution, however, we've been slow to react. We've sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. Where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse, as I've just shown....
There are a number of reasons for our inertness in the face of this advance. First, for centuries, newspapers as a medium enjoyed a virtual information monopoly – roughly from the birth of the printing press to the rise of radio. We never had a reason to second-guess what we were doing. Second, even after the advent of television, a slow but steady decline in readership was masked by population growth that kept circulations reasonably intact. Third, even after absolute circulations started to decline in the 1990s, profitability did not.
But those days are gone. The trends are against us.
So unless we awaken to these changes, and adapt quickly, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans or, worse, many of us will disappear altogether.
I venture to say that not one newspaper represented in this room lacks a website. Yet how many of us can honestly say that we are taking maximum advantage of those websites to serve our readers, to strengthen our businesses, or to meet head-on what readers increasingly say is important to them in receiving their news?
If you're reading this blog, you know what Murdoch means. Newspapers are in trouble, yet they show few signs of rethinking what they do and how they do it. My own guess is that most of them won't. It seems to me highly unlikely that whatever eventually replaces newspapers--and they will be replaced, sooner rather than later--is going to be invented by the same people who are currently publishing newspapers. Established institutions rarely if ever transform themselves, least of all in response to external threats to their existence. (Here's an exception.) Instead, they are replaced by brand-new institutions that spring up in response to those same threats, seeing them as an opportunity.
Like I said, you already know what I'm talking about. But if you're an artist, ask yourself this: how are you using the new media to interact with your audience and spread the word about your work?
Specifically:
- Do you have a Web site? If so, do you update it regularly with fresh news of your activities, including links to stories about you that are published or broadcast in the mainstream media, or on other Web sites?
- Is your performance calendar up to date?
- Do you have an e-mailbox on your site? How often do you check it?
- Does your site contain a wide-ranging assortment of downloadable print-quality photographs of you and/or your work?
- Do you make prominent mention of the URL of your site whenever and wherever possible? Have you considered putting up a banner at your public appearances that has your URL on it in big, bold letters? Is the URL easy to remember--i.e., www.yourname.com?
- Can people who visit your site read, view, or listen to free samples of your work?
- Do you make your work available for sale through the site? If you're a visual artist, do you sell original works or prints via the Web? If you're a musician, is it possible to download recordings of your music? Do you know what ArtistShare is?
- Have you considered starting a blog, or keeping an online journal?
- Do you know what podcasting is?
I've said this before, but it can't be said often enough: the mainstream media aren't especially interested in serious art, and such interest as they do have is diminishing daily. If you're looking to big-city newspapers to start reviewing more literary fiction, or to PBS to telecast more ballet and modern dance, or to your local radio station to continue carrying the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday broadcasts, you're kidding yourself. They don't care. Which leaves you with two options. You can sit around complaining about their indifference--or you can do an end run around them and use the new media to reach out directly to your audience, both existing and potential.
Again, you know all this. Right? But what are you doing about it?
Here's Murdoch again:
Like many of you, I'm a digital immigrant. I wasn't weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few proprietors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives....
The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants – many of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and disseminated – to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience dealing with.
I know exactly what he means. I, too, am a middle-aged digital immigrant--but I'm here, now, communicating directly with you via a medium that barely existed five years ago. No, it wasn't easy, but I've rethought my expectations about what the mainstream media can do for me, and now I'm starting to do some of it myself. You can do the same thing, so long as you let go of your preconceptions about the dominant role of the old media in your professional life. (If I were an Internet entrepreneur instead of a writer, by the way, I'd launch a business devoted to creating a state-of-the-art presence on the Web for busy artists who don't know their way around a computer.)
Here's a model of an effective, well-designed Web site. And here's something Jeff Jarvis posted today about how local newspapers might rethink the way they do business in light of the emergence of new media. It's a thought experiment, an attempt to shake off the chokehold of the this-is-how-we've-always-done-it mindset. Read it. Then try applying the same kind of thinking to the way you do business as an artist.
Don't wait for the revolution. Start it yourself.
Posted April 14, 2005 12:43 PM
