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The Day Traditional Media Died

Today, my post was going to be about Traditional Media, inspired by my visit to AdAge  Friday. I was going to tell you that business and news magazines are going to die a slow death if they don't change in the following ways:

• Recognize that covering news or business in the traditional ways of reporting on what has happened is old news by the time you go to press and most of us already have moved on.
• Writing about movers and shakers only interests your potential corporate advertisers and only we baby boomers subscribe to publications that follow that practice because we were raised on reading newsprint. But many of us are unsubscribing.
• Most of us don't get our information about the Fortune 500 via traditional media, and while those companies represent good advertising opportunities, stories about them will not sustain subscriptions nor newsstand sales.
• You can be a leader and an innovator, or you can be a follower and get out of the way. In today's world, what would have been your next level of subscribers don't respect or care about followers and just want you to get out of the way.
• If you don't believe you can influence your readership, why should anyone read you? Obviously, you don't have much to say.
• More than 90% of businesses are small to mid-sized. And most employees and investors don't read about the Fortune 500 because those businesses only influence Wall Street, not Main Street. Business publications that ignore  businesses wherein almost all innovation happens will change or die in the next decade or two.
• Change or die. Understand what potential subscribes wants and needs are and meet or exceed them. Today, most of you oversell and under-deliver

That's what I was going to write, and I was going to offer some research and case studies to support each point. But being negative is easy because Traditional Media is so conservative, risk adverse and boring. Businesses with those characteristics grow revenues through mergers and acquisitions but not in the old-fashioned way: Creating great products and services that meet consumers wants and needs in ways that add value to their lives. That's what I was going to write.

Is the Daily News Relevant to Our Lives?

As I sometimes do, although infrequently, I took CNN.com's Quick Vote survey yesterday, and it got me  thinking that those who make editorial assignments and choose what we hear, see and read, don't seem to understand or care what is important to their public.

Here is the Quick Vote: Do you pay attention to endorsements when deciding which presidential candidate to vote for?

• Yes 11% 8054
• No 89% 66976
• Total Votes: 75030

Yet the headlines at CNN, MSNBC and FOX, as well as the New York Times, featured Joe Lieberman and the Des Moines Register endorsing John McCain.

As a former journalist, I can say from that POV that a media person's most important job is to inform the public on things that impact their lives, such as elections. But if CNN's unscientific poll holds any truth, endorsements don't impact many people's lives, and I tend to agree. They matter little in this information/conversation age, where we can access more information than ever before. That leads me to believe that endorsements are important to media decision-makers, even if they aren't to us. And we all can name other headlines that don't add or subtract anything from our lives.

Therefore, why are so many editorial decisions not based on what readers want and need instead of what editors and journalists deem important? Or are they? Am I off-base with my general analysis that those in traditional media do not care enough to learn what is important in our lives and report on those issues?

If they are aware, why do questions at the debates seem so beltway-centric, when most of us aren't very impacted by the day-to-day politics that go on in daily D.C? Do I really need to know who is sleeping with an intern or losing their temper in a committee meeting? Do I need to know again that the legislature held a vote on an issue for public relations purposes only, as everyone already knew the bill had no chance to pass.

This morning I received a poll from my representative about what mattered most to me. Unfortunately, most of the choices didn't matter that much to me. There were no questions about the state of social security, Medicare, Medicaid and only one general question regarding education. The only question about Iraq offered me an opportunity to direct my representative to get us out of there, when what's really important to me is not leaving the country in such a mess that the Middle East is worse off than before we entered the country. And the only question about health care was about universal health care, which is important to about 10 percent of Americans who want it but can't access it. Yes, it's important to discuss but what about other healthcare issues, such as funding for research. Finally, what about steroids in baseball. Now how does that impact my life? The farmer's life? The business person's life? The worker's life? Do we need headline after headline, discussion after discussion on that topic.

As a small business person, I read local business journals and the business sections of newspapers and online media. Someone help me understand why the stories are most often about the wealthiest and the largest, since most workers, managers, and executives neither work for or with the wealthies and the largest. I understand the importance of quarterly earnings of those businesses that contribute the most to GDP but I also care about the state of small and mid-sized businesses, as do you, I suspect. Where are those stories?

Whether or not you agree, your voice is important. If we are to get our wants and needs to be listened to and heard, blogs are a tool to get that done. The Fourth Estate is a vital asset and affects our lives in many ways. We went into Iraq quickly partly due to the press beating the drums of war. GE's Jack Welch was emblazoned in gold partly because of the media's love for what he was doing at GE. Trump became a national icon because of media attention. This stuff matters. At least to me. How about you?

Monster Interview: Lewis Green

Jane Sweat honored me this week with an interview. You can read it at Jericho Monster, Monster Interview: Lewis Green. We discuss everything from social media to happiness.

Fridays and Weekends Rock with Hunter S. Thompson

More a choir than a band, Hunter S. Thompson created gonzo journalism and influenced an entire generation of writers, reporters, musicians, rockers, hippies, intellectuals, poets, critics, beats, druggies, alcoholics, gun owners, patriots, publishers and adventurers. But in a new book written by his wife, Anita, called The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, she argues that he was misunderstood.

According to today's CNN.com which posted an AP article entitled, The truth about Hunter S. Thompson, "It wasn't a reckless obsession with liquor, drugs and gunplay that made the late Hunter S. Thompson the undisputed king of Gonzo journalism, his wife says. Instead, it was old-fashioned principles such as working hard and telling the truth, enlivened by the glee Thompson took from learning and from being right."

No matter the truth, Thompson was a hero to me. Committing suicide by gunshot in 2005, he is better known for his outrageous behavior than for his brilliant writings, and that is a shame. If you are a writer, you must read Hunter S. Thompson, you just must. Here he is, courtesy YouTube:

John Cusack's Favorite Hunter S Thompson Stories

Hunter S. Thompson's Death of a Poet

Tim Russert Interviews Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S Thompson NORML Owl Farm party, June, 2006

New York Times Contradicts Itself

Here's the headline: Europe and U.S. Reach Climate Deal.

Now, here's the lead paragraph: HEILIGENDAMM, Germany, June 7 — The United States agreed today to “seriously consider” a European proposal to combat global warming by halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, breaking a trans-Atlantic deadlock at a meeting here of the world’s richest industrial nations.

What's wrong with this picture? Agreeing to "seriously consider" a proposal is hardly reaching a climate deal. The headline sits less than an inch from the lead. Surely the copy editor (person who writes headlines) read the lead. Couldn't the editor recognize the difference between reaching a deal and seriously considering a proposal?

Here's the point: Whether or not we like it, the media is the 4th Estate. It's role, as seen by the founding fathers when they included Freedom of the Press in the Bill of Rights was that of a watchdog and communications conduit to the people. If we lose faith in the news media, their role becomes corrupted, and all of our freedoms come into jeopardy.

All we have as marketers, public relations professionals, advertising specialists, journalists, pundits and business people is our credibility. When that fades to a lack of trust between us and our audiences, we fade with it. And our country grows weak. The foundation of credibility is trust, and the foundation of trust is built upon our values, our professionalism, our ability to speak and write the truth as we find it (or see it), and our eagerness to put people first always, not products, services, or provocative but misleading headlines.

What can we do to change the current environment where exploitation of people by loud and misleading headlines, screaming hosts on cable news networks, attack bulldogs on radio, and businesses willing to share versions of the truth to make a sale? To be honest, I think most businesses and most media want to do the right thing. So why aren't they?

We Do Love Our Media

We Americans love our media, but who knew the extent to which we have carried that passion. According to a December 19 post on eMarketer.com called I want my media!, "The TV and MTV generations (and that includes almost all of us now) are not satisfied with one channel any longer — we have become multi-channel media omnivores.

"In fact, when you add it all up, according to the data in the new "Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007," from the US Census Bureau, Americans spend more time every day consuming media than they do eating.

"According to the Census Bureau, Americans spend nearly half their lives with TV, radio, the Internet and newspapers — often using more than one at a time."

Yikes, is this a good thing? I wonder, are we losing our capacity and our desire to spend face time with our families and friends? And what about our face time networking?

I believe and continue to advise my clients that face time and building real-time relationships with others are key to building our businesses and creating word-of-mouth that builds our brands. The use of media to do so is necessary and helpful, but we need to remember that these are tools to spread the word, and if we begin to forgo human contact, our business and personal relationships will suffer for it.

Media Bungles Tragedy

Yesterday, a small plane tragically crashed into a New York City high rise, killing the celebrity pilot and his passenger. The tragedy is newsworthy, especially when a plane hits a building in NYC. However, I find the attention given by media self-serving, demeaning to all those who die in such events, and proof that journalism has fallen to the dogs of talk.

Instead of quickly becoming a local story once the details were in, cable news led with it for hours, long after it ceased being a national story. Why? Because the pilot, who I will not name out of respect for his family, is a sports celebrity. Measure the attention given this story against other similar tragedies.

Everyday people are killed tragically. Soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan, pedestrians are killed in our streets, planes crash, avalanches consume their victims. With the exception of soldiers' sacrifices in a war, should these stories be plastered in headlines across our national media?

The truth in today's news media is that good visuals make good headlines, regardless of the newsworthiness attached to those visuals. And celebrities always make good headlines.

Why? How do these headlines inform and educate us? What is the purpose of news? Have news services become irrelevant to our lives and just a means to gratify our curious and grisly sides?