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The Content Crisis Deconstructed

Business Week’s Lars Bastholm wrote an interesting article. When I read it, I thought about a wacky professor I had at Duquesne University decades ago who loved beyond all reason the approach to textual analysis pinned to Jacque Derrida. (If you cut that class in modern critical analysis, you can get a brief here.) On the surface, “The Content Crisis” is another one of those the “sky is falling” articles that “real” journalists write. When these crisis revealed articles appear in traditional magazines like Business Week, I take notice. My reasoning is that the top brass at McGraw Hill probably does not think to much about the pressures on the worker bees in the journalistic hive on Sixth Avenue. The worker bees do think about what is happening to the magazine industry in particular and the broader traditional information industry in general. A write up like Lars Bastholm is essentially a news story about that now tired phrase “the content crisis”. Passages like this one are recycled like newspapers by the Rumpke Corporation which operates in Harrod’s Creek:

What I propose is that phone companies and Internet providers just slap additional content fees onto their bills. Sure, I don’t like the additional fee. But if a $10 monthly content fee was added to both my existing AT&T and Time Warner bills, and in return I got access to all the content I wanted, it would feel pretty close to free.

The article argues that a magazine can charge for content. The money, however, would be collected by an outfit such as AT&T and Time Warner. Okay. I wonder if Mr. Bastholm knows how money is shared by a utility across multiple providers? That question is one that has been sidestepped in the write up. That question is an important one, however.

The traditional world has morphed. One cannot go back. Image source: http://www.astrococktail.com/images/Deconstruction700.jpg

The article concludes with what was probably in journalism school a killer peg:

So when you think about it, is $20 a month really a big price to pay for saving movies, TV, music, magazines, and newspapers and getting rid of unwanted advertising in one fell swoop? It feels like a bargain to me.

What triggered the Derridaesque moment for me were these notions waddling through this addled goose’s brain:

1. The article is less of a news story and more of a plank in a political platform for Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to charge for information with a nod to the microcode method favored by the Associated Press. I can see the senior editor, the publisher, and one McGraw Hill vice president standing in the hall with copies of the print publication, smiling and nodding about a job well done.
2. The notion that a utility (essentially a monopoly if set up correctly) will share money in a way that returns the lion’s share of the revenue to one supplier is at odds with my experience. Utilities, due to buying power and market control, force suppliers to deliver at very competitive rates. Instead of a payday, the utility wheels and deals. Coal is a commodity to Duke Power. Information is a commodity to AT&T and Time Warner. Forgetting what business utilities are in will lead to a financial surprise when the first payment arrives 45 to 90 days late.
3. The solution advocated in the article does not address the broader challenge. The children of publishing executives—possibly Mr. Bastholm’s own or his friends’ are not interested in traditional media as much as I was when I was young and callow. In fact, each generation in the demographic pipeline younger than the preceding cohort will be less and less interested in the “traditional” approach to information.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a young journalist. I asked about the person’s recent experience in journalism classes at one of the * major * journalism schools. I jotted down that person’s comment because it underscores the need to deconstruct what Business Week has written about “the content crisis”. The journalist told me:

I think that my professors know that the media and news world is changing. But the classes don’t reflect that change. Now that I am working, I see first hand that the traditional approach to news is not where the opportunities are. Online is the future and it has arrived. (Editor at a magazine publisher located in the United States.)

As M. Derrida observed, “Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.”

Stephen Arnold, August 13, 2009

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