encouraging news about the news

[miriam_e]

I like to watch Hank and John Green's scishow and crashcourse (history, chemistry, biology) vlogs on YouTube. Recently they made a questionaire in an attempt to understand their audience better. One of the questions they asked was How much time do you spend watching TV per day? The results tell a very interesting story.

		Response percent	Response count
0-1 hours		55.8%	70,807
1-2 hours		28.1%	35,717
2-4 hours		12.4%	15,727
4-6 hours		2.8%	3,516
more than 6 hours		1%	1,131
		answered question	126,898

A pity they didn't make a separate category of zero hours for people like me who don't watch TV at all, but considering how few TV programs are less than 1 hour long I wonder if most of those who chose the 0-1 hours category meant zero hours. Admittedly this is a self-selecting population of net-heads. Nevertheless, the numbers and the trend are very encouraging.

Radio has been in slow decline for some time, especially the news programs. Newspapers are currently experiencing a crisis with their readership disappearing. TV has had a problem trying to attract people back to news and current affairs programs, but I didn't realise how many people are tuning out and ignoring TV altogether.

The mainstream media are poisoning themselves to death. Radio, TV, and newspapers could have been (sometimes were) socially useful. I wish that they had been responsible citizens and reported honestly instead of becoming fear-mongering propagandists, but they didn't, so good riddance to them. I can hardly wait for their influence to dwindle to merely a distant bad memory.

Comments

[miriam_e]

Yes, I feel sorry for the genuine journalists and media professionals who are enmeshed in the gears of what has become a pretty horrible machine. Still, I'm surprised large numbers of them haven't denounced the damage that is being done to their professions by vested interests. Their silence (grimly trying to hang onto their jobs, I expect) only guarantees the demise of their profession -- well the mainstream media portion anyway.

When TV follows radio and newspapers down the plughole I don't know what they will do for work. The internet has, so far, not produced much money for artists and writers and video technicians. Could be why it's still allowed to be relatively free; with money comes the chains.

You say it isn't a single thing, and in a sense that's true, but the fact that it works pretty-much with a single voice nowadays would tend to defeat any attempt at separating the parts. And as we approach this farce of an election, just watch how it orchestrates the heaping of scorn on Julia Gillard (who I'm no great fan of, but she doesn't deserve the senseless ragging she constantly gets from the media) and assists that amoral, predatory half-wit Tony Abbott to gain control of our country.

Where is the news? There is plenty of real news out there, much of it wonderful and very, very cool, some of it worrying... but it gets replaced by this stupid crap from the mainstream media.

If the media professionals let themselves be driven into non-existence by "the small cadre of high profile media owners, and advertising considerations" instead of giving people balanced and real information then sadly they can't really blame anyone else. What would they say? He made me do it? I was just following orders?

And I get the problem. People are in hock up to their eyeballs. They can't afford to rock the boat because they have a family and a mortgage, etc., but I think it is getting to the point where none of that matters. By not doing anything they soon won't have their jobs anyway.

[greylock]

What would they say? He made me do it? I was just following orders?

Pretty much. The old guard have been forced out by young, cheap cadets who churn out copy for hungry websites, and these people coming through have seen 10 years where senior and mid-tier journos have been made redundant, in an atmosphere where celeb news is ranked pari passu with "real news".

I'm not sure if it's not too late to fix the media.
We've spent 2-3 weeks now on this rubbish leadership speculation. You'd be hard-pressed to know if there was policy work going on.

[miriam_e]

It is weird isn't it. The media owners do everything they can to wreck their industry then fire journalists to keep costs down because people aren't buying the soulless trash they've required their staff to produce. I'm pretty sure the mainstream media would do much better if the owners got fired instead.

There are some encouraging things. Hank and John Green employ a small staff to put out a lot of quite high quality information in their vlogs (video blogs). Check out the crashcourse history videos especially. And there are a number of other companies who are starting to do nicely making videos online. I have no idea how they derive income, but they are managing it somehow.

Cory Doctorow gives away all his books online as ebooks as a way of boosting his dead-tree books. It works, letting him to sell more books than, as he says, authors who are better writers than him.

Baen Books and Tor Books give away some of their ebooks, as a honeypot to lure people into buying ebooks and dead-tree books. As added incentive none of their ebooks have DRM locks on them so you actually own the books you buy and can view them with whatever reader you desire. I've bought from there often. They seem to be maintaining a stable business, thankfully, though I wish their science fiction was a little less militarily inclined -- guns, guns, guns -- it is hard to find truly ingenious science fiction with intelligent, peaceful stories anymore.