Media’s Future Debated in L.A. Times Series
This week, Robert W. McChesney, president and co-founder of Free Press, and Glenn Reynolds, blogger at Instapundit.com, are discussing the future of media in a five-part series — Dust Up — on the L.A. Times Web site.
Each day, they address a different aspect of the media system — from the state of contemporary news, to citizen journalism, to the future role of the FCC. McChesney analyzes the impact of consolidation, while Reynolds examines the role of new media technologies.
In the first installment, McChesney exposes the underbelly of a commercialized, consolidated media — declining local and foreign news, overemphasis on celebrity fluff, inadequate campaign coverage, and failure to expose government corruption.
Reynolds’ installment outlines how new technologies are fragmenting Big Media’s audience while exploding the number of competitors. (Although it’s a stretch to say that a local blog is a direct competitor to a broadcast TV station.)
Today’s discussion focused on whether citizen journalism can replace traditional media. Both McChesney and Reynolds agreed that traditional media organizations have more infrastructure and resources to cover news and that the quality of mainstream journalism is rapidly eroding.
But where Reynolds sees the crisis in journalism as the result of executive mismanagement, McChesney points to the structural crisis caused by consolidation. As McChesney points out:
“Journalism cannot be done entirely on the cheap or in someone’s spare time, even the expanded spare time of the digital era. We need effective policies to promote the institutional foundation of a free press.”
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s discussion on American newspapers.
