From Howard Kurtz’ “Media Notes” Column in Monday’s Washington Post:
“When I was speaking at Harvard recently, a smug graduate student said, ‘I get everything I need from YouTube. What are you going to do about it?’ ‘What are you going to do about it?’ I shot back. If people want to tune out the news, no one can compel them to change their habits. We can be smarter, faster and jazzier in providing information, but we can’t force-feed the stuff. If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.”
The Associated Press is on my Wii, Howard. If you weren’t such an elitist douchebag with raging Boomer technofear, you’d know that. When I want to check the news really quickly, I can fire up the Wii, and, in 30 seconds, have a screenful of reports from around the globe. The real question is, Howard, why aren’t you on my Wii? And why aren’t you on my cell phone? And why aren’t you on my sister-in-law’s iPod? Your editors too afraid of “diluting the brand?” Or are they too focused on presentation and identity rather than content?
As I’ve come to understand how Web 2.0 works, I’ve come to the conclusion that content has finally become truely decoupled from presentation. Content producers need to start looking at the AP to see how the new media world works. The AP was producing news feeds about a century before the nerds discovered them and democratized them. Now, the AP is brilliantly situated to exploit this new technology without having to sigificantly alter its business operations. …which is more than anyone can say for the Washington Post Company.
