LAT OP ED: AOL & HuffPo. The loser? Journalism

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten-column-huffington-aol-20110209,0,2992862.column

To grasp the Huffington Post's business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.
By Tim Rutten

February 9, 2011

Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL's $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape, it's already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.

That's a development that will hurt not only the people who gather and edit the news but also readers and viewers.

To understand why, it's helpful to step back from the wide-eyed coverage focused on foundering AOL's last-ditch effort to stave off the oblivion of irrelevance, or Brentwood-based Arianna Huffington's astonishing commercial achievement in taking her Web news portal from startup to commercial success in less than six years.

The media-saturated environment in which we live has been called "the information age" when, in fact, it's the data age. Information is data arranged in an intelligible order. Journalism is information collected and analyzed in ways people actually can use. Though AOL and the Huffington Post claim to have staked their future on giving visitors to their sites online journalism, what they actually provide is "content," which is what journalism becomes when it's adulterated into a mere commodity.

FULL story at link.

[gratuitous]

1. Journalism? A dinosaur

And the folks to credit are the same glory hogs who turned journalism into a commodity in the last 30 years. There is surely plenty of blame to apportion, from starry-eyed star-fucker “journalists” who cozied up to the power structure in hopes of scoring a plum insider job, to the media moguls who cared more about the bottom line than the product. News shows were always relatively cheap to produce, but when they became another commodity, they had to bring in the money as well. It was no longer enough to produce classics like “Harvest of Shame”; now you had to bring in sitcom-level viewership numbers.

Hand in hand with the search for the maximum viewing audience was the consideration of access. The conventional thinking was that if you didn’t have access, you didn’t have shit, and the power players were certainly not going to disabuse their media courtiers of that notion. This put the relationship between subject and reporter all out of whack, with the veiled contempt of the subject gaining the upper hand, and the reporter having to swallow everything in order to keep the door open. Reporters and their bosses began to think that they need the big shots more than the big shots needed them.

And in a way, it was true. Anyone with a keyboard and a modem could set up a website and put out any information they wanted to put out. It didn’t matter if it was true or false, it just had to get a space in the arena of ideas. With the relentlessness of the tides, the forces of repression sold the idea that there was some kind of bias in reporting factually, and that equal time had to be afforded to even the most specious counterarguments. Enslaved to the fear of losing access, the major media players acquiesced, and the pernicious lie that both sides deserved equal consideration gained in acceptance until now it’s impossible to call a lie a lie. Because if you call out a lie, you’ll lose access. And there will be no shortage of other new media outlets screaming about your bias. Before you know it, the basis of the argument has been lost, and the discussion is now about re-establishing a media outlet’s bona fides against the accusation of bias.

Except, of course, for one outlet and one mogul. The worst excesses are all excused in this magical network and cable channel empire, and everyone agrees to pretend that it’s fair and balanced.

So yeah, it's too bad about journalism. But a lot of their wounds were self-inflicted. And the journalists who thought that their vital jobs could never be outsourced have found out quite differently. The profession is a handful of highly-paid superstars and scores of thousands of men and women who can't make a living at it anymore, just like a lot of other professions.