An important week

Over at Vodkapundit, Steve posits that the NY Times is making a bad business decision, between laying off hundreds of employees and charging for access to their opinion pages.

To me, it signals the end of a long era in journalism. The layoffs and the desperate bids for increased revenue tell me that the Times is bleeding and is trying unsuccessfully to staunch the flow. Instead of looking seriously at the big knife stuck in their chest, they're trying to stitch around it.

Ok, enough with the blood metaphor. Clearly the growth of new media and the internet has taken a chunk out of their business, and they are scrambling to catch up. You could argue that these layoffs represent the first concrete evidence that "flammable" media is dying. The problem is that like most large corporations, those who are responsible for fixing the problems refuse to examine their own biases. A paradigm shift has taken place in the last 5 years. Media consumers now have multiple sources for news, and freely compare the information they get from each. They don't just accept the editorializing found at one source or another. Editors and publishers haven't (as yet) been able to look carefully at their own papers or broadcasts to see what it is that consumers are turning away from.

The Times will never be the same. It will never wield the same kind of authority that it did in days past. Why? Because as they lay off reporters they will lose the newsroom flexibility to cover breaking news, update older stories, and fact check pieces before publication. Forget editing, if you've even perused the Grey Lady over the last couple of years, you know that went out the window a long time ago.

Another step away from the "old media" also took place this week, though it was largely symbolic. During Sunday night's Emmy broadcast, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and the late Peter Jennings were honored for their contributions to network news over the last two decades. Although the segment was supposed to serve as a memorial to Jennings, and a recognition of the careers of Brokaw and Rather, it was also a tacit memorial to the role of network news in American culture. Since the birth of TV, the majority of Americans got their national and international news from the evening broadcasts of each of the three major networks. With the retirement of Brokaw, the "retirement" of Rather, and the death of Jennings, clearly an era has ended. What remains to be seen is whether the evening news will ever be as important in American culture as it was before.

It is likely that in years to come we will look back at this week as highly significant in the history of media in that the events of this week represent the emerging importance of "new media" and the effect that internet journalism and blogging have on the bottom line of older media outlets.