The heyday of newspapers had them operating amid a scarcity of information. The average citizen in Omaha, Tallahassee, or even Los Angeles simply couldn’t collect information from DC or Nairobi, couldn’t call up yesterday’s presidential speech, couldn’t choose from thousands of content sources and millions of blogs and dozens of cable news channels. Newspapers, due to their wide array of reporters, their investment-heavy text transmission infrastructure, and their near-monopolies in individual markets, added a ton of value in getting consumers information they couldn’t otherwise access. That’s changed.
Now information is abundant, even too abundant. What readers need is interpretation, filters, guides. The media — dare I say it? — needs to mediate. That’s where they can add the value. The basic stenography that was valuable in one age isn’t worthless in this one, but it’s simplistic, and not nearly enough.
Further, we’re not merely dealing with an era in which information has become overwhelmingly abundant, we’re caught in a moment when all sides have become exquisitely sophisticated at spinning it, at publicizing what they want heard, distorting what scares them, drowning out what hurts them, discrediting what attacks them. So not only is there too much for the average consumer to deal with, it’s not even clear what they should deal with, what’s honest, who can be trusted. This is dicier territory, of course, but I think those who fret over the newspaper’s capability to serve this guiding function give insufficient thought to how odd the concept of objective news coverage has always been, and how much more potential there was for abuse when there was nearly no in-market competition.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.