Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved

[Craig Good]

Posting is not necessarily endorsement. Here's Topolsky's take.

Your problem is that you make shit. A lot of shit. Cheap shit. And no one cares about you or your cheap shit. And an increasingly aware, connected, and mutable audience is onto your cheap shit. They don’t want your cheap shit. They want the good shit. And they will go to find it somewhere. Hell, they’ll even pay for it.

[Scott Hotes]

Is this premise (that "no one cares about your cheap shit") backed up by numbers?  When leading shows on cable are things like "Duck Dynasty" and the latest "The Bachelor", is this more wishful thinking?  Don't worry, the cream will rise to the top.  In the end, we are rational beings and thoughtful, rational content will win the day?  I want to believe.

Look at the movie business.  More and more the box-office is dominated by franchise plays.  Not "cheap" in terms of budget, but certainly thin on intellectual content.

What about books, and what it takes to be a successful novelist in this new world order?  Only a handful of people today are self-sustaining, perhaps only tangentially related, but may speak to the "they'll even pay for it", relating to quality content.

I hope Topolsky is right, and the trend is there, but more and more I feel that the digital revolution, while possibly not culpable, is commensurate with a frightening decline in the quality of media content and the "level of discourse".

Scott

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 10:04 AM, Craig Good <clg...@gmail.com> wrote:

Posting is not necessarily endorsement. Here's Topolsky's take.

Your problem is that you make shit. A lot of shit. Cheap shit. And no one cares about you or your cheap shit. And an increasingly aware, connected, and mutable audience is onto your cheap shit. They don’t want your cheap shit. They want the good shit. And they will go to find it somewhere. Hell, they’ll even pay for it.

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[jack saunders]

There's much to what Topolsky says, but he's really shilling for Medium.com -- not a bad thing by any means.  It's an odd trend (both Medium and podcasts) in favor of long form journalism.  

Buzzfeed, Vox, Vice and imitators ran the game in the easy direction -- lighter, shorter, easy stuff, from snarky "listicles" to snapshot statistics, and gathered huge click tallies for dumbing things down.  So it's at least curious that Medium and podcasts are suddenly all the rage.  

Old timers like me still say the New York Review of Books is the best value for money on earth.  Where else can you count on editors who are NOT in a hurry to choose the 5 best scholarly books on ISIS, or the financial crisis, or Ebola, or transexual politics -- and commission a world class expert in the field to review them, compare-and-contrast style?  Five thousand words later, the reader is among the world's best informed people on that subject.  For my purposes, it doesn't get any better than that.  Pass it on to a student.  It's even better than cheating.

 

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From: Scott Hotes <sah...@gmail.com>
To: Craig Good <clg...@gmail.com>
Cc: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2016 10:51 AM
Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/Ipse-dixit/CAC7%2BDACH0OX4cRfkVATBEDTXjwnuFaP4ehCAJZzQjaWrpXyyaQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Scott Hotes]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 2:08 PM, jack saunders <jack...@pacbell.net> wrote:

Old timers like me still say the New York Review of Books is the best value for money on earth.  Where else can you count on editors who are NOT in a hurry to choose the 5 best scholarly books on ISIS, or the financial crisis, or Ebola, or transexual politics -- and commission a world class expert in the field to review them, compare-and-contrast style?  Five thousand words later, the reader is among the world's best informed people on that subject.  For my purposes, it doesn't get any better than that.  Pass it on to a student.  It's even better than cheating.

Agreed.  The NYRB and the Sunday NY Times are the only two things I'm currently

paying for (I dropped The Economist many years ago when they wrote an editorial

backing the war in Iraq...)  I refer to the NYRB as my "bastion of sanity", and always

turn to the Letters section first.  That all discourse could be so civilized...

Scott