I keep on hearing about the demise of the MSM. Sure they deserve to go. They no longer report the news but actually make it up and report it with a very biased slant. OK for the MSM and our government but not very good for us. Sadly though there is nothing to replace them on the horizon so I think their demise is not quite in sight yet.
The problem we have is that the only real replacement is something like the blogosphere but that doesn’t gather it’s own news just feeds of the news suppliers and then puts its own slant on things. Very much like the MSM but as there is so many more views you can get a wide variety of different views and see many different views on what is going on. In addition, some of those views are so biased and uninformed that it just supports the view that the blogosphere is full of nutters and useless information. Plus the number of people reading the blogs are insignificant compared to the number of people reading the papers with nice boobies in. Even in the US the sites with the highest number of hits do not even approach 1% of the population. The dead tree press is still No. 1.
What we really need is a sheet of plastic that can be bent and read like a news paper which uses articles downloaded from the web or TV and enough memory to contain an entire magazine at least. Get people used to dealing with this media and away from the dead tree press. And I don’t mean something cumbersome and locked like Kimble but simply a easy to use visual display that will display anything you want. Like the web but probably with it’s own HTTP type protocols. The MSM won’t want to do it. Perhaps we need some sort of scare to get people away from dead trees. Mmmm. Let me think.
Once people start using reusable media for books and newspapers links will be added to blogs and the like so that even the truck driver in his cab will be able to read more about what is going on in a much better meld of data and analysis than you can get from one biased newspaper. It will change the world.
But, and you knew there was one, we do have a bit of a data gathering problem. Currently the dead tree press and the TV channels pay people to go around the world gathering news and sending it back to be processed. If the dead tree press were to stop making money they would be forced to stop paying people to go around finding the news. We would be reliant on the TV people and they have wildly different criteria for their people. TV being visual and the dead tree press being verbal. So without these people gathering the news what would we have to talk about?
It seems to me that if we ever manage to push ourselves up to the same reader level as the MSM, partly helped by their declining standards, we can meet halfway, we may actually have to start paying for our news sources in some way. Not a problem for the dead tree media they charge for their complete paper, but as individual bloggers mostof us can’t charge, and unless we charge how would we pay for the news gathering army of reporters?
I’d hate to see a single organisation set up to gather the news yet would couldn’t have an army of self employed journalists chasing everything and only getting paid per hit. They would soon start to concentrate on the lucrative stuff and leave the hard stuff alone. Could you see another Watergate or the expenses scandal? So we need some sort of model where we can still tap into the news, the reporters get paid and the consumers gets to read lots of different views without an over bearing MSM. Not sure how that will work and it clearly needs some thought.
In the meantime the MSN might wake up to the fact we are effectively using their material for free and set up access control to make sure it’s paid for. The more people stop buying dead trees the quicker that will be. Bit of a catch 22 for us.
What good fortune for governments that the people do not think. — Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945)
How we should read the news
I keep on hearing about the demise of the MSM. Sure they deserve to go. They no longer report the news but actually make it up and report it with a very biased slant. OK for the MSM and our government but not very good for us. Sadly though there is nothing to replace them on the horizon so I think their demise is not quite in sight yet.
The problem we have is that the only real replacement is something like the blogosphere but that doesn’t gather it’s own news just feeds of the news suppliers and then puts its own slant on things. Very much like the MSM but as there is so many more views you can get a wide variety of different views and see many different views on what is going on. In addition, some of those views are so biased and uninformed that it just supports the view that the blogosphere is full of nutters and useless information. Plus the number of people reading the blogs are insignificant compared to the number of people reading the papers with nice boobies in. Even in the US the sites with the highest number of hits do not even approach 1% of the population. The dead tree press is still No. 1.
What we really need is a sheet of plastic that can be bent and read like a news paper which uses articles downloaded from the web or TV and enough memory to contain an entire magazine at least. Get people used to dealing with this media and away from the dead tree press. And I don’t mean something cumbersome and locked like Kimble but simply a easy to use visual display that will display anything you want. Like the web but probably with it’s own HTTP type protocols. The MSM won’t want to do it. Perhaps we need some sort of scare to get people away from dead trees. Mmmm. Let me think.
Once people start using reusable media for books and newspapers links will be added to blogs and the like so that even the truck driver in his cab will be able to read more about what is going on in a much better meld of data and analysis than you can get from one biased newspaper. It will change the world.
But, and you knew there was one, we do have a bit of a data gathering problem. Currently the dead tree press and the TV channels pay people to go around the world gathering news and sending it back to be processed. If the dead tree press were to stop making money they would be forced to stop paying people to go around finding the news. We would be reliant on the TV people and they have wildly different criteria for their people. TV being visual and the dead tree press being verbal. So without these people gathering the news what would we have to talk about?
It seems to me that if we ever manage to push ourselves up to the same reader level as the MSM, partly helped by their declining standards, we can meet halfway, we may actually have to start paying for our news sources in some way. Not a problem for the dead tree media they charge for their complete paper, but as individual bloggers mostof us can’t charge, and unless we charge how would we pay for the news gathering army of reporters?
I’d hate to see a single organisation set up to gather the news yet would couldn’t have an army of self employed journalists chasing everything and only getting paid per hit. They would soon start to concentrate on the lucrative stuff and leave the hard stuff alone. Could you see another Watergate or the expenses scandal? So we need some sort of model where we can still tap into the news, the reporters get paid and the consumers gets to read lots of different views without an over bearing MSM. Not sure how that will work and it clearly needs some thought.
In the meantime the MSN might wake up to the fact we are effectively using their material for free and set up access control to make sure it’s paid for. The more people stop buying dead trees the quicker that will be. Bit of a catch 22 for us.