Posts Tagged New York Times
New York Times is Wrong to Force-Feed Its Content
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on March 5th, 2010
Like so many media companies, the New York Times is fighting a battle to maintain its place in the journalism order as people read less and, when they do read, increasingly do it online, where so much content is free.
But the venerable newspaper is putting itself on the wrong side of history by partnering with a digital out-of-home (DOOH) TV company whose business model is based on force-feeding content to people who haven’t asked for it and in some cases can’t get away from it.
The Times announced last week that it had signed a deal with RMG Networks, a company that operates tens of thousands of screens in public places where people either can’t or have to pay a high opportunity cost to get away from the unwanted content.
The newspaper says its content will be aired exclusively on 850 screens and more screens are in the works. Mixed in with its content will be advertisements. In commenting on the deal, Linda Kaplan Thaler, an advertising agency executive, says advertisers like these screens because people often have little choice but to consume the content because people become “captive for a while.”
In saying that its content will air on the 850 screens, the New York Times is being disingenuous. What it really means is its content will be force-fed to people who are in proximity to the screens and who can’t just walk away if they don’t want the unwanted intrusion.
Although we at Media by Choice understand the economic pressure even admirable media companies are under, force-feeding their content to people is a short-term tactic that adds to the visual and audio noise from which people today are trying to escape. We think the New York Times is smirching its good name by stooping to something as crass as digital out-of-home media.
Stabbing Over Loud Music Reveals Cultural Rift
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on July 9th, 2009
A loud-music tussle that ended in a stabbing death a few weeks ago in Cincinnati has spawned a lot of commentary and soul-searching among commentators about the state of humanity, but arguments over noise that turn violent are dog-bites-man stories.
All you have to do is search “conflicts over noise” or some variant of that on Google and you’ll get story after story of people turning violent, including murderously violent, over music and other noise.
What’s striking is that, in almost all cases, it’s not the person who’s perturbed over the noise that becomes violent; it’s the person making the noise that does.
It’s the business of social scientists to look into why this is so, and I’m sure many already have. But one thing I know is that, at least in the case of boom cars, playing one’s music loud is largely about one thing, and one thing only: thumbing your nose at other people.
A study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice several years back, when boom cars were first becoming a menace, concluded that the culture’s anti-social aspects aren’t a side effect of boom cars but a core value of it.
“Playing car stereos loudly can be an act of social defiance by some . . . an important part of their cultural identity and lifestyle,” the report says. “It is not easy to change the behavior of those who see loud car stereos as an important part of their lifestyle.”
Anyone who’s confronted a boomer already knows this, of course. Noise Free America, a nonprofit advocacy organization, maintains a database of car stereo ads that are celebrations of anti-social behavior. The ads joke about playing your music so loud that older people go into cardiac arrest. Or they joke about flipping people off when they complain about your music.
This is toxic stuff.
To be sure, car stereo companies have cooled it in recent years. One of their trade groups, the Mobile Enhancement Retailers Association, came out with a policy a few years ago discouraging that kind of thing among its members. Although I haven’t looked into it, I suspect most have in fact moved away from overt appeals to people’s baser instincts. But why was it ever allowed to get to this point in the first place?
We live on a small planet that’s getting smaller. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it, our planet is hot, flat, and crowded. He’s talking about our relationship to the environment, not to our “soundscape.” But the two go hand in hand. Our soundscape is just as much a part of our environment as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the resources we consume. People either act as stewards of our environment or as users of it. When you play your music so loud that you impose yourself on others, you’re using our soundscape. What we need is a consensus that we should acts as stewards of our soundscape. It’s only when we reach that consensus that the violence will stop.
Force-fed media leave us naked in the surf
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on July 8th, 2009
Thomas Friedman in a New York Times column several weeks ago bemoans the sorry state of American education by referring to a Warren Buffet quip that only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.
In Friedman’s take, the tide has gone out and the United States is now exposed as naked economically because of the poor job we’ve done raising our educational standards. After leading the world in the quality of education in the 1950s through the 1970s (and charting our biggest economic gains at the same time through real, rather than paper, growth), we’ve fallen further behind the rest of the developed world. The only thing that’s maintained the illusion of continued American strength are bubbles.
He quotes a McKinsey assessment that the U.S. economy would have grown larger by up to $2.3 trillion in 2008 had the country closed the education gap between itself and high-achieving countries like Finland and South Korea.
To be sure, there are plenty of thoughtful people who insist the United States doesn’t need to generate top-class academic achievers to compete globally because of other factors working in our favor: business-favorable laws, a still-strong university system, a well-developed system for allocating capital, and our entrepreneurial culture, among other things.
It’s hard not to agree that the U.S. continues to have a lot working in its favor, but Friedman’s point is that we’re living on borrowed time; we capitalized on our advantages so well after World War II that we put ourselves into an unassailable economic position and we’ve been coasting on that legacy ever since. But now the tide is going out and we have no more bubbles to cover up our nakedness. The rest of the world is catching up and is indeed poised to surpass us because while our kids are playing video games, watching YouTube, and listening to their iPods, the kids in other developed countries are succeeding in schools that actually challenge them.
Clearly, kids are kids the world over, and a 19-year-old in South Korea is just as likely to spend his downtime watching YouTube and listening to his iPod as an American kid. But there’s no contesting the fact that, at least for a large chunk of the student population in the U.S., mastery of math and the other basics has taken a backseat to electronic distractions. It’s hard to concentrate on math problems or text on a static sheet of paper when you’ve grown up having devices constantly buzzing, ringing, and flashing light at you. Is it any wonder that a 14-year-old today finds school irrelevant? The world has been completely transformed in the last 20 years thanks to the Internet and other innovations in communications technology, yet schools remain organized the same as they were 100 years ago. They still teach as if the classroom remains the principal door to knowledge for children.
The move toward captive-audience media in this country makes the educational challenge that much more difficult to meet because it reinforces the message that schools, with its legacy of text-based learning, is irrelevant. How can a teacher press her students to concentrate on a static sheet of text or math problems when everything in the world outside the classroom is moving in the direction of not just audio-visual communication but force-fed audio-visual communication?
With force-fed communication, the message comes to the audience, whether the audience wants it or not. If I’m sitting on a bus, the TV playing overhead forces its content onto me, and my only option is to try to block it out. If we multiply these types of captive-audience environments to include the many places we conduct the business of our lives–trains, airports, elevators, street corners, gas stations, restaurants, gyms–we become conditioned to having information pressed on us.
That’s very different than having to get the information ourselves. With print-based media, it’s up to the reader to extract the information out of a text. A page of text can’t be forced onto me like a minute’s worth of video content. With video, I can sit back passively and let the content come to me. With print, I have to go to the content and extract meaning from it.
When you consider the information environment in which our kids today have grown up, it’s no mystery why schools are struggling in their educational mission. Even the best teachers are challenged to make reading and math exciting when your students have grown up in a world expecting information to come to them.
There’s much to support Friedman’s contention that education in this country is in a hole, and business leaders should be concerned about that if they’re not already. But the next time you hear business leaders bemoaning the substandard reading and math skills of new graduates who apply for jobs with their companies, you might first want to see if their business model is contributing to the problem. If their business supports or profits by captive-audience media — i.e., they advertise on captive-audience media platforms or they’re in the business of delivering information to people in captive-audience settings — then they are signaling to children that it’s okay to sit back and wait for information to come to them. Indeed, everything about audience captivity reinforces passivity in people.
It’s fair to say, then, that we have seen the enemy and it is us.
Future of journalism: more screens not the answer
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on May 7th, 2009
It’s long overdue but Congress is finally starting to take a serious look at how we’re supposed to stay informed as citizens of a democracy after newspapers are replaced by online news aggregators.
Yesterday a Senate Commerce subcommittee heard from representatives of Google, the New America Foundation, the Huffington Post, and the Knight Foundation, among others, on whether newspapers are worth saving and, if so, in what form, and what should be done to help ensure the Internet becomes a source of the kind of information we need to be effective citizens. The alternative is that the Internet descends further into a wasteland of opinion and cribbed news stories.
As former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon told the subcommittee, although he didn’t put it quite this way, it’s great that we have the Internet to get as much news as we can on a subject. But when the newspapers that provide all the bedrock stories disappear, will there be anything worth searching?
“The Internet is a marvelous tool and clearly it is the informational delivery system of our future, but thus far it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating Web sites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth.”
Arianna Huffington, who heads up the eponymously named blogger site Huffington Post, had a different take on things, as you would expect. But everyone was in agreement that first-generation reporting really is the key to keeping us appropriately informed as citizens in a democracy, and it really doesn’t matter in what form that reporting is published, whether its pixels on a screen or ink on paper.
Yet the medium does matter, and it’s important that in our rush to save journalism we not replace newspapers with force-fed content. Several witnesses at the hearing rightly talked about the rise of second-class citizenship among people, particularly in rural areas, who have inadequate high-speed access to the Internet. Inarguably this digital divide must be closed. But one remedy that would be disastrous is for lawmakers and the journalism community, in a terribly unfortunate example of good intentions gone awry, to encourage the proliferation of TVs in public places, as if lack of screens is the problem.
Although this issue didn’t come up at the hearing, it’s just the kind of self-serving pseudo-solution that one can imagine self-serving media entities to make. It’s for that reason it’s not a good sign that several witnesses spoke in favor of collapsing the firewall between print and broadcast media to enable TV networks and other broadcast companies to get into the newspaper business. Proposals like that should make anyone who fears “synergies” nervous.
In the context of journalism, one thing that “synergies” might very likely mean is the proliferation of screens in public spaces, ostensibly to showcase all the great news being reported but really to inflate the number of captive eyeballs media companies can deliver to advertisers. The idea that high-quality journalism would be underwriting and justifying the proliferation of screens would in all likelihood just be a smokescreen to justify the very undemocratic force-feeding of content to people.
Former Washington Post editor Steve Coll’s remarks about fostering a healthy nonprofit journalism sector that would have an eye on shaping the digital revolution to serve rather than damage the public interest are worth considering. Coll is now head of the New America Foundation.
Journalism is transforming before our eyes and traditional journalism clearly will look different five years from now. But filling our world with screens in the name of ensuring democracy would be a Trojan horse for force-feeding intrusive media to citizens.
Let us now praise the journalistic enterprise
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on May 5th, 2009
Judging from the focus in the New York Times yesterday you’d think traditional print media is pretty important. Maybe it’s because two days ago the Times filed public notice that it was shutting down the Boston Globe, which it has owned since 1993. The filing was widely seen as a negotiating ploy, because the Times is in cost talks with Globe employees. But the filing nevertheless exposed the Times to criticism that it was selling out its commitment to quality journalism, so maybe the newspaper was feeling a bit defensive.
First there was a story, called “Newspapers’ essential strengths,” about the indispensability of business reporters to regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission in digging out questionable business tactics.
Then there was a story about courageous journalism . The Record, a New Jersey newspaper, ran a piece detailing the business connections of members of a hospital board even after some board members threatened to punish the newspaper by pulling its ads, canceling its online advertising contract, and even prohibiting the sale of the newspaper in its gift store. Ouch!
And then there was a story about rivals to Amazon’s Kindle reader that promise to provide a platform for newspapers and magazines to stay competitive in our increasingly digital media age.
The effect of these three stories lumped together had the feel of an announcement that talk of traditional media’s death is premature. That’s a good thing, because much of the vim and vigor in the media business today seems to be in the sectors that have no stake in the traditional journalistic enterprise. Captive-audience media is about one thing and one thing only: showering people with audio and visual noise so that anyone who’s unfortunate enough to be stuck in the bus, train, or coffeehouse with it can’t ignore it. These media enterprises are in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. They’re not in the business of investigating securities fraud or exposing power connections among hospital board members, yet they’re sucking the oxygen out of the traditional media that is in the business of rooting out stories in the public interest.
So, if the editors of the Times want to trumpet all the good that traditional journalistic enterprises do, good for them.
New York Times reels, captive-audience media rises
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on April 22nd, 2009
The New York Times today (April 22) reported a $74.5 million quarterly loss. That’s not surprising news when you consider the body blow traditional journalism companies have sustained in the past year. The Internet has been driving readers away from traditional news media for a while now, and advertisers, hit by the economic slowdown along with everyone else, are pulling back.
It’s this kind of trend that has the Knight Foundation worried about the future of democracy (see yesterday’s post). If traditional media start going under at an even faster clip than they are today, what media outlets will fill the void?
Yet there’s one segment of the media industry that’s doing pretty well, and that’s captive-audience media. Clearly, advertisers like the idea that their message gets in front of an audience that has no choice but to hear what they have to say.
Just a few weeks before the New York Times announced its big quarterly revenue drop, a place-based media company called Ripple Media announced it had just received $4 million in venture capital funding. I’m not a businessman, so I don’t know how $4 million stacks up in the world of big business, but the fact that any company is getting money pumped into its coffers during our severe economic downturn strikes me as pretty impressive.
In early April there was another news brief, in Advertising Age, that said digital out-of-home growth is poised for big gains.
The contrast between what’s happening at the New York Times and what’s happening in out-of-home media (all of which is a form of captive-audience media, as we’re defining it in this blog) is significant. In traditional media, the audience goes to the media. (I pick up the New York Times or go to its Web site to get the news.) In out-of-home media, also known as place-based media, the media comes to the audience, whether the audience wants it ir not. (I ride the bus and the TV is playing overhead, or I go to buy shoes at a shoe store and an in-store TV network is broadcasting).
It makes sense why advertisers would like spending money when they know they have a captive audience. But if the present trend continues, and ad money keeps flowing out of traditional media and into captive-audience media, the shape of our world will look very different a few years down the road. No longer will we feel we’re in control of our media consumption, because so much of the media will come to us.
That’s not a future that looks good to some people. For anyone who dosen’t want to be constantly bombarded with unwanted TV and other intrusive media, it’s hard not to hope that there’s a sustainable business model for media companies that respect their audience enough to let their audience come to them rather than push their content onto people who haven’t asked for it.
