Media: Hersh not bullish on the MSM
Here are two links via Romenesko about the relationship between print and online media.
Seymour M. Hersh is the quintessential muckraking investigative journalist. This is what he thinks of blogs and online journalism, from an interview in Jewish Journal:
JJ: New York magazine has a profile this week of Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, and they call him “America’s Most Influential Journalist.” What have bloggers like Drudge done to journalism, and how do you think it compares to the muckrakers that you came of age with?
SH: There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to The New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism.
I’ve been working for The New Yorker recently since ‘93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about. Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded.
So, we have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it. I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.
Bfriefly, the New York Times was offering a paid-content site with material not available in the print version and not available anywhere else online. They recently took down the site. That leaves the NYT with exactly what most other print and broadcast organizations offer on their Web sites: Mostly free content that duplicates what’s available elsewhere.
Internet guru John Dvorak thinks this is a mistake:
he only papers or news organizations that can expect to survive will be those with lots of original content available only at their individual sites. The operations that rely more on universally available news feeds will be at the mercy of a fickle public — one that doesn’t care where they read a particular story, especially if it is the exact same story with the exact same headline.
It’s telling that local news organizations seldom seem to put the effort into at least rewriting the often-dull headlines from the wire services. I can assure you that the online public notices this.
Years ago, this lazy model worked. The wire services used to provide local papers with a wide range of stories that local editors could use to enliven their news mix.
Over time, many newspaper owners saw the savings they could realize from loading up on wire stories while minimizing their original editorial content.
Once the Internet arrived, this model was dead, as the Net revealed that many newspapers weren’t actually contributing anything new or unique. The fact that people all over the country subscribe to the New York Times, rather than to a local paper, says it all.
My own humble opinion is that one of the reasons the MSM is tossing its already existing content onto the Web for free is that they WANT the public to be saturated with the same old junk. They MSM is afraid of local online startups with low overhead. If there’s a ton of free content online it makes it hard for these start-ups to charge for anything. It’s a deliberate attempt to stifle the competition.
The economics of the situation will change, eventually, as younger people accustomed to getting news from the Internet will recognize the value of paying for premium local content, much in the same way that oldsters pay for a daily newspaper with the ads, comics and Ann Landers.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
