Tag Archives: media

It’s the mindset that dooms them

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Blogs that cover the cultural and economic effects of the Internet on newspaper publishing are all linking a couple of articles in The Economist about the latter’s dire straits:

For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.

So what are newspapers to do?

Gal Beckerman, at CJR Daily, ends a summary of the piece with this little zinger:

If the only way to make newspapers profitable is to turn “fine journalism” into junk, than maybe we should start thinking about whether or not news is too precious a commodity to be subjected to the same economic rules by which one sells widgets or hamburgers.

That would be “free market” rules, right? Bring on state-subsidized newspapers!

Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis excerpts from this companion piece in a post titled “Who Saved the Treees?” — and notes that it ends hopefully. This is about change, after all. And change is only a threat if you aren’t willing to change with it.

I was thinking last night about how Google has made a fortune organizing content for people without regard to its quality while newspapers husband their content jealously — in essence, they place a higher value on the content than on peoples’ access to it. “This is so good, you have to pay to see it.” “If you want to read this, you have to register and maintain an account with us.”

It’s a completely different mindset. No wonder the newspaper industry is in flames.

Ignore what you read

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A few days ago I blogged about Newsweek‘s lame-acre retraction of a story they published 20 years ago. The story claimed unmarried women over 40 were more likely to die by a terrorist attack than find a husband. The claim was bogus; Newsweek‘s attitude contemptible.

Now comes this article by Philip E. Tetlock at Project Syndicate,  “How Accurate Are Your Pet Pundits?”

Tetlock has written a book (Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?) that looks at pundit predictions, reported in the media, and whether they’ve come to pass.

This guy deserves a medal for calling attention to this. A big flashy platinum medal with a huge cash prize attached:

[W]hen hordes of pundits are jostling for the limelight, many are tempted to claim that they know more than they do. Boom and doom pundits are the most reliable over-claimers.

Between 1985 and 2005, boomsters made 10-year forecasts that exaggerated the chances of big positive changes in both financial markets (e.g., a Dow Jones Industrial Average of 36,000) and world politics (e.g., tranquility in the Middle East and dynamic growth in sub-Saharan Africa). They assigned probabilities of 65% to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15% of the time.

In the same period, doomsters performed even more poorly, exaggerating the chances of negative changes in all the same places where boomsters accentuated the positive, plus several more (I still await the impending disintegration of Canada, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Belgium, and Sudan). They assigned probabilities of 70% to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12% of the time.

Tetlock calls for tracking pundits’ records publicly, so that media consumers have a way of judging their credibility.

I say, we should also hold the media to account. After all, if false pundits weren’t hugged and kissed and led out into the spotlight, “here’s your microphone, dear,” their silly pronouncements could do no harm . . .