A carefully edited Nikki Finke, forced to separate the gossip from the fact, would be a very valuable player at any media outlet.  People connect to opinions and are endlessly intrigued by gossip.  I see nothing wrong with the New York Times or any Traditional Media having a serious opinion component.  But that is when the idea of Church & State becomes absolutely critical. 
We have seen it more clearly and dramatically illustrated during the WGA strike than any other time in memory.  The rather simple facts gave way to opinion in almost every outlet there was, Traditional or New.  Traditional Media caught the sickness of minutiae obsession, as Nikki Finke romanced The Writers with intimate, often accurate detail, all spun against the AMPTP with reckless pith, and got the kind of attention that Traditional Media writers have been missing for years.  So much of the coverage turned into a call & response with her.
The problem?  She was reporting bowel movements.  And worse, when Her Masters’ Voices on the studio side, where she normally is fed every gossip item she runs, whispered in her ear, she ran those comments with the same energy with which she ran the "good guys" case.  As a result, there were no fewer than four admonishments by the WGA in the course of the strike not to pay attention to her rantings.
But people did pay attention.  And Traditional Media responded to her, usually as the unnamed driver of stories, and most often took the opposing AMPTP side. 
But here is the problem for the TMers… the spirit of blogging, exposing who they really are and how they really feel is nasty, dangerous stuff for them.  You have to wonder whether they can ever go back now that the genie is out of the bottle. 
Not every journalist is a born debater… or creative writer, for that matter.  Not every journalist is built to write a blog. 
And what Traditional Media should understand better than anyone on the web and doesn’t seem to understand at all … there is a basic law of diminishing returns on the web.  The more a paper turns into a series of mediocre blogs by minor personalities, the closer to the end of that paper we get.
Just ask Nick Denton, who humiliatingly has been forced to return to heavy lifting for Gawker Media as the harsh reality of Blogging As Business caught up with him and his business, who has learned that niche really is niche.  So will Traditional Media.  (After I wrote the foundation of this piece, on Sunday night, Defamer I, Mark Lisanti, announced his exit and word is that Denton is looking for a "name" blogger from outside of the Gawker Media family to replace him … a first time, desperate act.)
The scariest stat of last week, to me, was that Jerry Yang is worth about $2.2 billion … a little more than a third of what Mark Cuban walked away with for the basically irrelevant Broadcast.com, bought by AOL all those years ago.  The guy isn’t poor, but he is not anywhere near the top of the Bubble List.
This is a lesson that the film industry is also in danger of being on the wrong side of as we watch the evolution of The Ownership Era of film and television.  People continue to get distracted by the methods of delivery when the big lurking monster is the creation of a short tail in pursuit of the long tail. 
But I digress …
It’s incredibly difficult for anyone to concede the turf that they feel they have created.  It is hard for those of us who have been self-defining for a decade or less.  It is even harder for Traditional Media where decades and centuries of competition within the ranks of the tried and true has left fat, happy infrastructures that cannot see a way to compete that doesn’t involve budget cuts rather that the building of a broader base of ideas.
It may be – it will be – that the budget cuts still have to happen.  But creative thinking means making more with what you have while these big companies are struggling not to lose what they have.
I have this conversation with young filmmakers all the time, who see the numbers on Hollywood films and gag with fury over the waste.  "How can they spend all that money?"  "Give me that money and I can make 200 movies!"  Etc.
But they are wrong.  Because the infrastructure overpowers almost everyone who gets sucked into it, whether it’s the intimate infrastructure of blogging that leads to unquenchable ego or the massive structure of TM outlets.
In a time of change, people and businesses must come to understand the necessity to risk real change. 
It becomes even harder when you are a paper like the Los Angeles Times.  The paper has struggled mightily with failed attempts to become internet players.  They made a mistake that set them back more than five years by putting up a pay wall for a couple of years.  They have hired wannabe hipsters like Joel Stein, who have added nothing but derision to the paper.  They have tried out a panoply of internet writers who have failed, one after the other, to offer a voice that the public or the industry has connected with on a level recognizable by the standards of newspaper columnists of the past.
As it turns out, on the entertainment side, research has shown that the only recognizable name on their entire roster is Patrick Goldstein … a guy who has wined and dined his way out of anything close to relevance in his once-a-week coverage of the industry.  I mean, nice guy (even if he hates my guts for daring to criticize him a few times a year), but … over.  Building on Patrick’s name is building on sand.  He couldn’t find the progressive side of an industry argument with a seeing eye CEO.  He makes Peter "Internet … We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Internet" Bart look like an edgy thinker these days, with just two speeds left in his arsenal … kiss or kill.  And more and more, even kill starts with a kiss somewhere.
But what’s a paper to do?  This guy is THE recognizable name they have left on that beat according to their own research.  But every month they continue with him a THE name, they fall further and further behind. 
And the guy still gets respect.  There is an awards season story that he forced into being a near-exclusive just recently.  It’s classic … a show of power and desperate weakness all at once.  We are in the era of the fight being about delivering the best product, not muscling publicists into exclusivity.  And what does the publicist get for giving up the exclusive … a kiss-ass profile when people are suspicious of kiss-ass profiles as opposed to a half dozen more real pieces with many multiples of readership (at least a dozen).
Don’t think I am not sympathetic to the chafing.  MCN, five years in, has become part of The Entertainment Media Establishment.  However important we are or are not, we have established a place at the table.  And in that maturity, as with other media outlets, we develop ego and expectation and a sense of what slotting is "fair" or "unfair."  We also have a different sense of what is or isn’t important.  Things we fought for just a few years ago are now uninteresting.
I see colleagues, a few steps behind in that specific way (that does not speak to quality or inherent value), going through many of the steps I have taken myself, often years ago.  I see that sense of mistrust or frustration or anger at the system that has mostly passed out of my life’s work, replaced by different forms of mistrust, frustration, and anger.  As I am on the bubble of the Baby Boomer and Generation X, so I am on the bubble of Traditional Media and New Media. 
The way that a generation of journalists just slightly older than me – and some, my age and younger – see the progression of a career is markedly different than my view.  For them, the goal is to be a part of the establishment, preferably at an outlet that does not embarrass them with its conformity … but hell, conformity can be fun too if you are working for a big company and get all the perks that entails. 
Maybe it’s that I never wanted to be a journalist that makes me such an oddball in this group. But my idea of fun has never been finding the biggest job at the biggest place possible.  When I find this work compelling, it is because of the work, not the ego of where it has been published and how it has been received.  When I "compete," it is as much with the vastly more powerful and funded New York Times as well as with the kid from Wisconsin who just started his site last summer and is making embarrassingly cogent arguments. 
New Media has to put up or shut up every single day. 
On one level, I think this is true of most Traditional Media as well … which is what makes them all (well, most of them) so nutty about The Web.  "Who are you to judge? — What if you’re right?"  It’s a horror show for someone whose sense of climbing the mountain was that once you got near the top, only your boss could push you off … and getting to the top meant that you were already a pretty damned good politician. 
But it is all too easy to get caught in the trap of wanting to keep what you have and not quite being able to accept that while some of what you have can be kept safe, the biggest prize, your reputation, is in play every single day, 24 hours a day, in ways you never realized from the comfort of your Traditional Media fantasy. 
This is being found to be the case in many New Media circles also … mostly the well-funded ones … or once well-funded ones.  And in the process, many of the child prodigies of the blogging world are suffering from a lack of Traditional Media visionaries who understand what these people, know how they must be used, and are capable of taking advantage of them at a price.  (This is not to say that some of the potential stars of Mixed Media are not problem children who have already started burning bridges.) 
Take Karina Longworth,
for instance.  She has been a celebrity of the web movie world for years now.  There are many things on which we disagree and I don’t think she likes me or my work much, but regardless, she is a media icon waiting to happen.  But it’s not going to happen on a website.  She needs a weekly slot in Entertainment Weekly where people can groove on her 50s glasses and geek goth chic and her sharpest tongue in a clear, simple form week after week after week.  I mean, Joel Stein … are you fucking kidding?  Karina competing day after day, story for story with every frickin’ blogger out there is a waste of what she can be. 
On the flip side, the only way we are going to see productive work out of Patrick Goldstein anytime before retirement is if the Tribune Co puts a golden gun to his head and makes him start blogging so he can deliver something other than shopworn, lunched out, careful, lame crap once a week from his whipped bully pulpit.  I believe that Patrick could get down and boogie with the best of the web.  But sitting on his down-feather-cushioned ass is not an answer. 
And by the way … Tribune has a killer asset in Claudia Eller, whose abusive, personal shot-taking column was killed off by the LA Times years ago because of the heat it caused and really should be reconsidered in the Blog Era.  Want to put Nikki Finke in her place with a real reporter who knows where a lot of bodies are buried?  I mean, the balls on Claudia spinning Nina Jacobson‘s exit from Disney into a birthing room beat-down by Dick Cook still looms as a spectacularly surreal moment in recent e-media history.  But on a blog … home run stuff!  Let’s see that knife in Claudia’s hand!
Flip again … Kim Masters should never be allowed any piece that takes less than a month to develop.  She’s great when she has all the pieces and gets her spurs on and puts the whole thing together.  But as a daily reporter, she is one of the easy gets for publicists who use "on the record" talent to spin webs. 
Why?  She’s Old School.  It’s a different brain activity, just like writing movies and writing sitcoms is not the same, just as writing plays and novels is not the same.  It’s not an insult to say someone is good at one thing and shite at another.  It is the nature of the beast. 
And so it is at the New York Times, where Brooks Barnes isn’t smart enough to know what he doesn’t know and the "new journalism" means a lot more editorializing inside of what are offered as news pieces. 
This is the battleground, publicly and privately. 
Journalism is NOT giving readers what they want.  But a big part of a newspaper might well be just that.  And it is time that we all recognize that. 
Transition and fear of loss has made most of us reactive … which is not a position of power.  We must learn to act with focus and bravery and conviction again.
With due respect, I read the New York Times to learn the facts that I may not know, not to find out what Brooks Barnes thinks.  And I read Nikki Finke to learn how she’s spinning, not because I am going to find journalistic facts.
Moving on …

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•