What's the Big Idea?

Capsule: The news has lost faith with its followers despite growing religious fervor in some news brands.  As newspaper and TV "institutions" evolve through the science of internet distribution, has news content changed its requirements?  With all of the "new news" science, what's happened to the basics of ethics and economics?

State of the Media


Some new thinkers think that "the news" is becoming a "news-ecosystem."  Why the news would evolve from a noun to a compound noun is tough to get.  We love the one-and-only news for its simplicity and its majestic, flawed arrogance in believing in its own ability to be objective.  Once, the news was our portal to the world.  The news was a believers' institution offering context for our moral and intellectual growth.  


In contrast, a news-ecosystem could turn out to be a priority-less Dr. Hyde of video and internet constellations with inflamed opinions their only atmosphere.  It will be harder to love and learn from a news-ecosystem--like a late-in-life conversion from God to science.  We may prefer religion; even though we're likely better off with what we create based on what we actually know.


The new news, the ecosystem, will attempt to generate revenue through a combination of public and private payments, subscriptions and grants alongside new and traditional advertising streams.  Micro-local news-related businesses are expected to make their contributions, as will the advertising revenue generated by internet bloggers and other major and minor news advocacy-as-entertainment sources.  Like science, the news-ecosystem will be complex and varied and will require specialists and guides.


To complete our conversion, it would help if some of the new news specialists ponied up a clear explanation of how the ecosystem will feed itself.  We can see glimmers of revenue opportunity in our changed habits.  Instead of reading a daily newspaper, we screen-read headlines, summaries and articles from multiple sources.  Couldn't we generate a bunch of small revenue streams--kind of like a trail of breadcrumbs between location and destination--each time we engage with a source?  This is a tough idea to take on faith.  We're sure someone will make money from all of the cookies we take and drop during our internet journeys, but so far, no one is making a lot on the news.


No one, it seems, but Fox.  The Fox News Channel hit an all-time high after the 2008 US Presidential election and its advertising revenues are only constrained by the weak quality of the ad business itself.  Fox remembers what its competitors forgot: news opinion, the more inflammatory the better, can earn loyalty.  Long generations of print newsmen, including Fox owner and founder Rupert Murdoch, have known this well.  William Randolph Hearst was celebrated for his devotion to commercial success fed by opinion-led journalism, lacing his news with a combination of his own occasionally liberal views and the conservative, sensational views that touched his readers directly on the heart.  


If it's true that taking power requires pettiness, it's no wonder that Fox News is thriving, even as the Fox-owned Wall Street Journal struggles along with its accomplished newspaper brethren.  Content and distribution have hit a perfect resonance in the emotional mastery of Fox's Roger Ailes.  Everyone on Fox seems powerful and petty--committed to the right, angry at the left and peevish about everything in between.  Why is print news less of an emotional powerhouse these days?  We seem to have lost God in print as we've taken up science on the internet.  With all of our many news-reading choices, can we doubt the complex evolution that got us here?


If TV news is the new emotional powerhouse, what's happened to CNN?  Once a perfect fusion of the emotional power of TV and the intellectual requirements of 24-hour global coverage, CNN today is really all over the place.  CNN "twitters."  It celebrates gadget wizardry in its layered multimedia showmanship.  It brings its most narcissistic audience members into the news with internet feeds from "average" viewers.  It celebrates contradictory emotions with the fascinating anti-immigration pro-birther-movement Lou Dobbs, who channels repressed aggression like a blonde, senior, ultraconservative Kevin Spacey.  (You don't want to make Kevin mad.)


There's a big difference between the emotional displays at Fox and the emotional displays at CNN.  Fox throws punches with a clear consistent aim.  CNN pulls punches seeming to fear they might connect.  With now-declining ratings, CNN may have left its brand origins as the originator of all cable news for an ecosystem brand--America's most trusted news source--accepting the presence of all comers while yearning for a less crowded field.  


Yearning isn't enough.  CNN was once the fiercest of media competitors, beating back five different early cable news alternatives to be trusted and watched.  But the CNN brand today seems undone by the complexity of the news ecosystem.  It earnestly tries to get the news right, but its budgets have been so sorely cut--along with the rest of the new news--that the efficient marketing of technical wizardry and twitter are inevitable.  


CNN's once liberal-leaning news bona fides have been challenged by everything from comedy segments on The Daily Show to MSNBC, promoting left-side emotions with unqualified zeal.  To appear balanced, MSNBC even has a right-side morning view--everyone knows the right rises early--with the gifted Joe Scarborough.  Telegenic and intellectually fluent, Scarborough makes the conservatives look like they have a more studied view than is often the case.  If only MSNBC and its ultra-right-wing business news-ish sibling CNBC could pay the bills without spending their late nights and weekends showing completely unrelated criminal reality shows and infomercials.  Shown a more integrated soul, we might really believe news was their business. 


As riveting as endless emotional displays can be, it's hard to absorb this new news complexity without getting bored.  In order to believe that new news models will work, we have to understand them.  We get the TV ratings system. We are willingly exploited as TV news whips up our emotions in cheap studio segments instead of engaging us intellectually by taking us to where the news is made.  It seems like the news ecosystem has tried to respond to our intellectual demands for alternatives, as well as to our emotional and religious preferences. But there is still this issue about how an ecosystem can make money as well as the news.  


Eventually, we will give some news sources new revenue lifelines by paying fees and clicking-through ads.  With our own money on the line, we'll be asked to substitute the unsure for the sure: in this case, the trust we invest in The New York Times will expand into faith in a supporting ecosystem that gets the news right through continuous re-examination and debate.


For the news enthusiast with an aggressive appetite, multiple content sources across multiple distribution media should teach more and better than a single trusted brand or anchor personality.  But the more news sources we consider, the less our appetites are engaged, especially when we have to research many of the facts for ourselves.  Our eyes are bigger than our news stomachs: we want to order everything on the menu and feel as if we've used our power of choice by acknowledging that choice is there.  


The truth is that we're fitting news-reading, listening and watching into increasingly smaller, pressured portions of our days made smaller and more pressured because of the quantity of content and the paucity of good news distribution models.  A new news network distribution system--like the traditional broadcast and newspaper systems--has yet to be developed to support our evolutionary needs.  


It's idealistic and insufficient to claim that the multitude of internet and video news sources in our new universe are accessible and capable of improving our lives on the merits of content alone.  This love of news content--no matter how it gets to us and no matter where it comes from--is even more devout and illogical than our love of singular news authorities and brands used to be.  When we were worshipping Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, we were grown up enough to understand that these same anchors had to interview celebrities and sell cigarettes and soap or there was no news.  There was real distribution muscle behind the news business and we were grown up enough to admit it even if we disliked it.  How else were we going to change it?


What's the big idea behind the new news-ecosystem?  Will a Cisco-like international network eventually merge with the great content minds of an NBC or a Time Warner to create new internet and video navigation making broad news sources digestible and therefore profitable?  What combination of science and religion will we have to accept in order to grow into our new news capacities?  In order for today's internet news sources to survive as something more than a quaint experiment, we're going to have to accept the primacy of profit.  We're also going to have to be petty enough to command our news ecosystem, weeding out news sources that don't deliver enough science to justify faith.