This is the post I made on Charlie Rose show's FB page.
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I’m curious about the story of CSPAN, a channel that started out to be a public access cable channel of congress that evolved into the people’s voice & ear to the government. It’s boring at times, but interestingly enough, that’s what makes it great.
They even have a CSPAN-II; aka BookTV. Imagine that, a TV channel dedicated solely to books.
Also I would like to request that the creators of “The Wire” to be on the Charlie Rose, especially David Simon, I think that this man has the key to save the newspapers.
There is a conventional wisdom that the Internet is killing newspapers the same way TV killed radio. A part of me finds this ironic, as I remember the news magazines in the 90’s labeled my generation “Gen X” & referred to us as “slackers”. It was my generation that took a little DARPA application called the Internet & built it into the World Wide Web & expanded it to Web 2.0 transforming the world, making it flat again.
From recent interviews of Simon, he questions that Conventional Wisdom. Simon says that this hemorrhage of newspapers started before the age of Internet. The main cause: profit maximization to the heed of WallStreet.
Nothing wrong with making profit. We’re all Capitalists here in the States, even those who admonish it still partake in it. We can admonish the vulgarities of the market, not the market itself; it just needs more checks & balances.
Simon also talks about news should be “Boring/Not boring”, news need to reserve the right to be boring at times, just to report & to comprehend the facts in order to be relevant to the social framework. A profit maximization goal makes news compete in the entertainment market which then becomes a mediocre product. The news cannot compete with “American Idol”; it just won’t win, because it has become half news/half entertainment, an abomination; neither newsworthy nor entertaining.
(For counterargument’s sake, there are many quality examples that are entertaining & informative. The difference is that these examples’ main goal is not profit maximization, but to entertain and/or to inform. These entities usually start out in the periphery & then grow organically.)
Being a child of the internet, (Okay, maybe I’m too old to be a child, how about young adult of the internet?), frankly I don’t like Simon’s idea of charging for news content & using lawyer muscle against anyone who copies content as RIAA did during the Napster days. But I know he can ignite the discussion where we can push & pull until we meet at an equilibrium point as ITunes offered for the wild, wild, west of peer-sharing music. Also, even before Internet news aggregators, every morning, CPANS’s Washington Journal reads headlines & stories from different newspapers from their desk. Would you charge CSPAN for aggregating news content?
When Simon talked about saving the newspapers he doesn’t mean just saving the paper form of newspapers, but he means save newspaper reporting; although saving the paper form would be nice to keep. He is focusing on newspaper reporting such as the local reporter on the neighborhood beat keeping the city council, mayor, & police department in check, just like a national reporter keeps Congress, the President, & the Defense Dept in check. If we lose the free press, we will become less free.
Just look all the totalitarian gov’t with no free press.
I’m a fan of Simon’s “The Wire”. They had 2 different audiences who loved the show; people of the Ghetto & intellectual critics. The critics praised the show saying the show had a “Dickensian” aspect.
True to form, the last season of “The Wire” mocked the “Dickensian” comment in their fictional newsroom.
Brilliant.
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