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The medium is the message? Darn.
Commentary by Patrick Keller
South Peace News
There are a lot of column inches being allocated to the subject of the demise of the newspaper. For better or for worse, it seems that newspapers will have to reinvent themselves to keep up with the times.
There is no obvious reason why some papers seem to be getting hit harder than others. It could be overhead; it could be a lack of advertising. It might be content.
In my quest to reveal the secrets of successful news print delivery systems, I chose two popular papers. The daily Edmonton Sun, at one inch thick, keeps me abreast of fluctuating truck prices and the capital city’s ongoing crime wave. The April 24 edition has no less than 116 full-page car dealer ads, which feel like light reading after headlines such as “Shooting leaves shock, horror in its wake:” “Bandit Kills clerk, self”, “Violent rapist locked up indefinitely” and “Fire gone wild”. These four headlines were squeezed onto just two pages of the same April 24 edition. This formula for success can be demonstrated mathematically as follows: new cars + wishful thinking / sensational crime = profit.
My next avenue of research led me to the institution known as the National Enquirer. This venerable tabloid has been around since 1926, and is the world’s biggest selling print publication.
The April 20 edition was a heady mix of celebrity gossip and political scandal.
Without their crack reporting, I never would have learned of 90210 star AnnaLynne McCord’s bad body odor (Page 3). I never would have known to steer away from Martha Stewart’s new line of patio furniture (“Three people loose fingertips to faulty lounge chair,” Page 7), and I feel especially grateful for news that “Cougar Courtney Fox parties with toyboy” (Page 14).
The 60-page weekly gossip-fest clocks in with just 10 full pages of advertising, giving readers much bang for their buck. With a sticker price of $4.79, the Enquirer doesn’t need to court car dealers, or rely on violent crime to turn a profit. Their formula might look like this: celebrity weight gain + bearded lady = shut-in - $5.00.
How long these two publications will entertain and inform remains to be seen, but what is obvious is that the Internet is now the world’s largest delivery system for news.
Internet content providers are now kicking themselves for freely giving away the finest commodity ever promised by the net – information. It’s going to be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle, now that we’ve all got a taste for free news, music and movies.
No one has quite figured out how newspapers can transition themselves into the digital era. Now that advertisers can promote their own products on the web for pennies a day, does that mean that news no longer has a value? Of course not. The real value of news will be revealed when it is forced to stand alone, not as a medium but as a message.
So far, Canada’s famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan has been spot-on: The medium is the message. Hopefully one day that will change.
The question is: Now that anyone can be a content provider, can we rely on “Bob’s Blog” to deliver unbiased reporting of important issues, as well as funny videos of the family cat on one convenient webpage? Let’s hope so… I just love that cat.
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