In the November/December 2008 issue, Columbia Journalism Review writes about the tragedy of the news media in the information age and the
struggle to find a financial foothold. The article asserts that media companies have neglected to look hard
enough at the larger implications of the new information landscape — and
more generally, of modern life.
The information age’s effect on news production and consumption has been profound. For all its benefits—increased transparency, accessibility, and democratization — the Internet has upended the business model of advertising-supported journalism. This, in turn, has led news outlets to a ferocious focus on profitability. Over the past decade, they have cut staff, closed bureaus, and shrunk the newshole. Yet despite these reductions, the average citizen is unlikely to complain of a lack of news. Anyone with access to the Internet has thousands of free news sources at his fingertips. In a matter of seconds, we can browse The New York Times and The Guardian, Newsweek and
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News is part of the atmosphere now, as pervasive — and in some ways as invasive — as advertising. It finds us in airport lounges and taxicabs, on our smart phones and PDAs, through e-mail providers and Internet search engines. Much of the time, it arrives unpackaged: headlines, updates, and articles are snatched from their original sources—often as soon as they’re published—and excerpted or aggregated on blogs, portals, social-networking sites, rss readers, and customizable homepages like My MSN, My Yahoo, myAOL, and iGoogle. These days, news comes at us in a flood of unrelated snippets.
As Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations<, explains, “The economic logic of the age is unbundling.” But information without context is meaningless. It is incapable of informing and can make consumers feel lost. As the AP noted in its research report, “The irony in news fatigue is that these consumers felt helpless to change their news consumption at a time when they have more control and choice than ever before. When the news wore them down, participants in the study showed a tendency to passively receive versus actively seek news.”
Read more of this article at CJR: Overload! Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information