Out of Touch

Newsflash: the local news in Pasadena is written by part-timers living in Southern India who watch city council meeting web streams and regurgitate press releases.

The idea was dismissed as a joke and decried as the grimy end to journalistic integrity when it was first brought up over a year ago.  But now bigger news outlets, including one owned by the chairman of the AP, are considering following suit.  And it turns out that Reuters has been doing this with Wall Street reporting since ’04.

It seems this is the story to many morals, depending on where you’re sitting.  For the Robertsons, Giddens, and Harvey’s of the world, this is a great way to revel in wonky terms like glocalization and time-space compression.  It also works for foregone conclusions of the bitter, self-defeating newspaper nostalgists.  And the pseudo-ethnocentric job-loss lamenters.

Choose your own conclusion in search of a justification.

In bonus irony, Maureen Dowd’s column on the topic (1st link above), which appeared in yesterday’s NY Times, was quickly reprinted with highly questionable permission by the Bangkok Post.

© Ryan Cunningham 2008

Tangiblity and the Morning After

At 9:30 AM on Wednesday morning, I went looking for a copy of the LA Times.  I checked more than twenty news racks and vendors in downtown LA, and couldn’t find a single one.  In fact, every single major daily had sold out by 9.  I wasn’t the only one who noticed.  It was the greatest sales day for print since September 12th, 2001.

Print is dying, but it isn’t dead, and one last asset that’s holding on is tangibility.  There’s something about the smell of the pages, the thud on your driveway, the texture on your table that will always be worth more than the convenience of an RSS feed.  What shocks me is that news organizations haven’t figured out how to harness that visceral value into anything more than the occasional morning-after commemorative edition.

Maybe someday they’ll stop fighting foregone conclusions and rebuild brands based on unique value.  Those somedays are running out.

© Ryan Cunningham 2008

First major national paper goes paperless

NYTimes reported yesterday that the Christian Science Monitor — one of the nation’s leading newspapers with a hundred-year history in print — will stop printing daily editions and focus almost entirely on its online publishing operations.  It’s an effort to save costs and consolidate revenues that only CSM can swing at this point (its church-backed nonprofit status and already-shriveled readership make it a special case) but it’s a decision that many other embattled papers may soon find themselves facing.

Why has the news market been so slow to adapt to a new media landscape?  Is this a quartet on the Titanic, or a long-overdue shift to a better-adapted future?

I’ll be watching this closely over the next few months as I’m currently wrapped up in a relevant spec-work brand strategy project for a master’s branding class.  The subject?  An even more embattled paper–the LA Times.  Stay tuned.

© Ryan Cunningham 2008