According to Mir, while editors often speak platitudinously about “listening to the readers”, etc., they actually do far more than that. Needless to say, under the new model, there isn’t even the pretense of separation between editors and funders. No longer is reporting driven by the genuine importance of a story or market fundamentals what drives the daily editorial search is “the most resonating pressing social issues that could justify fundraising and stimulate readers to donate.” In other words, the Times, Post, etc., are now in the business of selling fearmongering and outrage not the news. Editors now have to take into account the ideological views of their paid-up members and craft the news in a different way. To the extent that this was true, it is certainly no longer the case. Pre-internet, the reigning media-studies approach, created by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, held that, due to newspapers’ reliance on corporate advertising and government access, it was their function “to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.” Editors wanted a large and wealthy audience buying what was advertised and more or less supporting whatever government was in power. In essence, says Mir, the new membership model “incentivizes journalism to mutate into propaganda.” The reader-publisher relationship is no longer transactional, but one where the payer subsidizes the creation of the content and pays to validate the perceived worthiness of that content. What they’re actually paying for is a cause.Īs Mir writes, what triggers the membership fees and donations for today’s Times and Post readers is the knowledge that they help spread an agenda and influence others. ![]() Like everyone else, they can basically get it elsewhere for free through non-paywalled sites, social media outlets, and other digital platforms. Unlike the newspaper subscribers of yore, he writes, new, paid-up “members” of outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post don’t actually need the news they pay for. Mir, a media studies professor at the University of Toronto (home of the late, pioneering media analyst, Marshall McLuhan), spends most of Postjounalism grappling with the ramifications of traditional outlets having moved from a funding model based on advertisers (primarily) and subscribers, to one relying on “memberships” and donations. ![]() ![]() From the warping of traditional news reporting, our politics and political rhetoric, and even our collective psychology, America’s post-media, post-journalism reality is truly terrifying. Those still standing now rely on reader-generated revenue, as traditional advertisers go with the more efficient technologies offered by the Google/Facebook duopoly.Īny reader of Andrey Mir’s latest book, a case study of disruptive innovation called Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, will come away thinking that we haven’t at all grasped what’s really been wrought. ![]() For traditional newspapers, advertising revenue has all but dried up, shuttering hundreds of city and local dailies as a consequence. It’s old news, of course, that the media industry has undergone nothing short of a revolution these last couple of decades.
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