The Next Desperate Step
The trades are pretty much over.
There is still a market for trade news, but it’s small and it has become a fast and furious fight to be “first,” regardless of how that goal is achieved. And the trades now have chosen to fight on that formerly unthinkable level.
Peter Bart wrote a column about it last week and he was right to say that the internet has forced Traditional Media and its reporters into a wake-up call they never wanted or asked for. But like so many, in making this call – as he had made the call to treat the web like a disabled child to be hidden in the basement for the last decade – he didn’t bother to calculate the cost.
So shouldn’t it be a surprise to anyone that The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd ran, as an EXCLUSIVE, NBC’s fall schedule some hours before its intended announcement – they released it officially later in the day – by way of wandering into a hotel ballroom and “reporting” the details available in the tech run-through of the presentation.
It’s certainly not reporting, this scoop. But is having unnamed agents and publicists plant stories all day long reporting either? Is one actually less honorable than the other?
Like so many things, who cares? Right? It’s a network TV schedule. Sure, someone might get a nasty surprise a little early… some deal might not be closed and get reconsidered by premature public exposure… but really, does it matter?
Does anything matter?
Are we just settled into the “if you can get to it, you can publish it” mindset… no standards, no honor, no common bond except for the lowest common denominator? Is that journalism 2010?
To Catch A Predator leading every newscast… but since we’re a little bored, let’s hire some 18-year-old hookers to play the underage girls and let them actually commit the sex act before Brian Williams walks in. Why not? The excuses from the guys would be HILARIOUS!
I feel like a Luddite sometimes. I actually still believe in the rules and the honorable pursuit of the truth. And I am forced to wonder, more and more, from the journalists’ side and from the industry that indulges the increasing ugliness of how we are all expected to do business, if I am just a fool for thinking any standard other than my own bottom line – money, fame, vanity, power – matters.
Perhaps it’s time to get into producing, where at least the sharks are honest about the intent of their bite.
(CORRECTED 1:58a – NBC apparently intended to announce this afternoon because of other scheduling issues… making the “exclusive” even shorter.)
Now you’re talking.
Not that it changes anything, but NBC was going to announce their schedule later today anyway, and then present it on Monday. THR only beat the official announcement by a few hours.
It does seem like a completely irrevirsible process, doesn’t it?
In a slightly different world trades would be in no risk of going away because people would be willing to shell out a relatively small amount of extra money to pay for the difference in quality that usually came from sources where writers had degress (sorry) and actually had any sort of editorial oversight. These days though the internet even managed to spoil that and editorial columns in local papers read more and more like blog entries.
(In related news the Time Magazine(!) just published the “ultimate” list of all time worst superhero sequels. Hooray!)
Of course, there is little value in the format itself. And so, old media isn’t different just because it in the paper businness. The difference is in what they used to choose to post. So maybe, in that slightly different world the transition would still happen but it would be unnoticeable.
Alas, here on Earth, the shrinking list of salaried critics is more akin to a doomsday clock.
I have little respect for online Journalists not because of what they are but because I’ve read them. From the beginning. Heck, I was one of them for a time. I am not some naive goon with a bonner for Variety or New York times. They had a tons of their own problems. Nor am I a Luddite though I, too, feel like one now. But gosh, there was a difference once!
The biggest irony of all, is that Poland’s reflections on the corrupt (actually directionless is a much better word – think about it) nature of today’s journalism are mostly by products of the new media culture. The problems are not new, but, boy, are they ever amplified.
And I wouldn’t necessarily be to quick to occuse someone like Gubert for being too late to the party. Maybe he understood it all before we think it did and didn’t want to spoil whatever time paper had left. Would a radical shift in focus coupled with earlier reaction really have repositioned Variety.com as the web’s leading portal for (exclusive) entertainment news?
Maybe. But maybe deep inside Peter didn’t want to be in the AICN/Finke business*. At least not right away.
And if you disagree with my take on the new media then ask yourself this: how many all-aggregate newspapers do you know?
In other words, how many papers can you name that lived and breathed by other’s people’s content, and when reprinting stories neither gave credit nor felt any particular responsibility to even get it right?
A week ago one website run a story on how Hugh Hefner saved the Hollywood sign. It was one of thousands to waste online space in that manner but what made that particular one interesting is that right in the headline it said that the Hef dropped a billion on the landmark. The article, of course, continued to say that the money covered the remaining amount of the $12 million goal.
You could say that this wasn’t a mistake but a deliberate attempt to generate extra traffic through an attention grabbing headline (like that hasn’t been done before). So I decided to check and wrote a small comment outlining that it was one thing to not pay enough attention to the facts (that’s unprofessionalism which is different) but gosh how stupid did the author had to be not to catch the mistake after all the math had already been worked out for him and he copied it, too? Not in so many words but somewhere the guy was called an idiot of the highest caliber.
Five minutes later the article was gone. Not just corrected but gone. You would have to exucse me for saying this but I couldn’t help but feel a very mild sense of triumph. And optimism, too.
I guess “scoop” and “exclusive” can be debated. But digging around and finding news that isn’t pre-packaged and ready to go is, in fact, reporting.
Cue Jack Walsh in 5… 4…
Well, that’s the illusion in entertainment journalism, isn’t it, Chris?
The ability to pre-package stories and to feed them out in a way that looks like “digging around and finding news” was involved is the wet dream of publicists… and the vast majority (over 90%, perhaps) of what you read about movies these days.
I’m not actually saying that The Era Of The Trades was much better. But it was more transparent for the average reader. And in those bygone years, the relationship between the paper and the publicists was well-established and had its own standards… for better or worse.
Now, with so many free agents, the bar has been lowered about as low as it can go outside of it being controlled by the government. Nikki Finke has replaced Liz Smith and Cindy Adams as a punchline and as The place to place your story unfettered by reporting. And in that process, people see Nikki as a great success and want to emulate the same… which they can… which leads to less reporting and more swallowing pre-packaged spin.
I agree. Digging around and finding news that isn’t pre-packaged is reporting. And 2 or 3 times a week, that now happens. But most of the time, buying that prototype iPhone is about as proactive as journalists are getting.
Welcome to the world where readers dictate what is news and what isn’t instead of the old media gate keepers.
It’s only going to get worse unless the audience gets a lot smarter and more choosy.
As far as the publicists side of this equation – speaking for myself, I have almost always encouraged (and hoped for) further questions and detail work from the press releases I put out, but it almost never happens.
Do I want to encourage the story being led in a certain direction or placed in a particular context? Of course, but I also want thorough, considered, in-depth coverage.
But if all I can hope for is a blatant reprint of the press release that I have written with the quotes I have supplied from my clients, then I’ll take that versus no coverage of the item or story.
And this isn’t a recent development either. When I was working at a personal PR firm years ago, we used to joke that I should have had my own byline at one of the trades because they would simply reprint verbatim the press release I had given them (passing it off as if they had actually done some “work” on it).