“… The inference is that in a new era of plentiful media choice, the ABC should step out the way, allowing commercial operators to deliver the content the Australian population needs and desires. …” [0]
When I hear Mark Day, a Journalist of 50 years, asking for less competition you know there is something going on in the news media. Newspapers are dying. Journalists are loosing their jobs and media owners are scrambling to find new ways to replace revenue. One’s and zeros are replacing ink and type as the delivery of news. [1] Big media does not want competition, they want their old monopoly back. And if you close enough independent media sources, they just might get that monopoly back. The Internet loves monopolies. [2] This is good for old media and media manipulators, bad for consumers of news – the rest of us.
There is plenty of news, but very little analysis. We need more analysis not less. We need people dedicated to sorting through the PR, the spin and entertainment that gets passed as news. We need people who can report and analyse the news that really matters to us – the good and the bad. So corporate media hacks, go back to your bosses. Tell them to innovate and find new ways to create profit in the new environment, because a new generation of companies are trying to out-innovate with computers and Moore’s law on their side. [3]
Reference
[0] In reply to Mark Scott, “Not for sale: The ABC as a public broadcaster”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/02/2834225.htm
[1] Doug Gross, CNN, “Survey: More Americans get news from Internet than newspapers or radio”
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/01/social.network.news/
[2] Scale-free network, Wikipedia, “Another important characteristic of scale-free networks is the clustering coefficient distribution, which decreases as the node degree increases. This distribution also follows a power law. That means that the low-degree nodes belong to very dense sub-graphs and those sub-graphs are connected to each other through hubs.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network
[3] RFS 1: The Future of Journalism, YCombinator, “Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time.”
Peter Renshaw 