Feb. 1, 2009
Media Is Changing, But Some Things Endure
Jeff Greenfield on the Evolution of the Media, and How Some Timeless Qualities Withstand Change
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As technology evolved over the past few decades, power has passed from the hands of the creators or delivery channels of information to its users — you. (AFP/Getty Images)
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When Sunday Morning marked its 25th anniversary, I was invited back to survey how the media landscape had changed. When this broadcast was born in 1979, I noted, there was no cable news, no abundance of cable channels, no C-SPAN. There were some reasonably big changes, of course.
But what has happened in the last five years can't even be captured by the word "change" - it is as if the most fundamental laws of the media universe have been overthrown.
Sure, some changes count as "more of the same." The big three networks, which divided 90 percent of the primetime audience 30 years ago, now divide about 30 percent, but they are still the dominant players in primetime.
And the major alternatives - basic cable channels like Lifetime, ESPN for sports, HBO for pay-cable alternatives - are thriving.
But where the last five years have brought a revolution is how information and entertainment is delivered, and where.
Five years ago, MySpace was the barest glimmer of an idea for a social networking site in Los Angeles; it's now a worldwide presence, with well over 120 million visitors a month.
Facebook didn't even exist five years ago. It now draws more than 200 million visitors.
Ask anyone about YouTube before 2005 and they'd have thought you were talking about an ointment. By last fall, it was drawing a hundred million viewers a month. Every minute, ten hours of videos are posted, ranging from news, sports, and entertainment clips to original creations. If you want to see what Mentos and Diet Coke can create in combination, YouTube provides the answer - dozens of them.
Well, okay, just more sources of media, right?
No. What these and countless other examples represent is a sea change that has upended all of our assumptions about how media are delivered. Today, everything we see and hear and read is "digitized" - a product of those countless "1's" and "0's'." And that, in turn, means that, as far as technology is concerned, it's all the same - print, audio, video, no difference. So what?
Here's what: Once upon a time - say, when Sunday Morning was born - every kind of information came in a different form. If you read mail, it came in an envelope. If you wanted to listen to news, you had to buy a radio. If you wanted to play music at home, you needed a phonograph and records. You wanted to read a newspaper? You needed the paper. A movie? That was a trip to the theatre, or a VCR. A phone call away from home? A pay phone. Write a report? Get a typewriter, and find a copier and a mailbox to send it around the world.
Now (to use the buzz word) "convergence" is here. Every conceivable kind of information - "information" in the broadest sense - comes to us on a raft of devices. Take the iPhone, which can be a newspaper, a TV screen, a camera, a theatre, a file cabinet, a radio, a Walkman, Yellow Pages, an edit room, and a travel agency.
And at root, this revolution has shifted massive amounts of power away from the providers to the users of information. You don't want to watch a program when it's on? Hey, it's always on somewhere. You like one song, but not an album? iTunes will oblige. You don't want to buy a newspaper? Read it for free (one reason why newspapers as we know them may not be around much longer).
Which raises this heretical thought: Whether on a TV screen or computer or cell phone or toaster, the fundamental things still apply (or should). A love of story-telling, a love of clear, vivid language, a respect for history - the world didn't start five years ago, even if YouTube did - these still matter most.
Which may be one big reason why 30 years on, this broadcast endures.
© MMIX, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Add a Comment See all 22 Comments
- The video is on youtube. (remember the subject of the story people!) CBS has a channel and the video from them is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdJlyh76dEc Katie also has a channel and the story from her is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQCb039opO8
- Reply to this comment
- I also saw the 30 year history show on Sunday morning, and thought you did a great job. The media is changing piece was very good. I would like to have a download of that, so I can use it to discuss the vision of the company I work for.
- Reply to this comment
- I am a college professor and this story is perfect for the Mass Media Literacy and Telecommunication courses that I teach. Please make the video available. Thanks
- Reply to this comment
- Can this be found as a video?
- Reply to this comment
- cameraphone,
Your user name gets me into a whole different area of irresponsibility when the internet becomes a form of media. There are pictures and videos posted of somebody assaulting somebody else drivers acting in a dangerous manner and even sexual assault on children. The people who post these are sometimes the perpetrators or their friends.
Posted by ausus at 12:15 AM : Feb 03, 2009
A cameraphone is an inanimate object, and much like the rhetoric that comes out of the National Rifle Association about guns, it is how a person uses a cameraphone and not the object itself that can be troubling.
But in this case, I choose the name cameraphone because I already had a cat named cablecar. - Reply to this comment
- Apologies for the double-post.
- Reply to this comment
- I morn the day when TRUE JOURNALISTS are completely gone. So much of what we watch or read today is hyped to increase ratings. News programs (the big three) and newspapers were the bastions of maintaining freedom from government and corporate malfeasance. Today they have almost been completely usurped by the corporate big-wigs to deliver "news" slanted to their political and/or business likings. Orwell''s "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is almost complete.
- Reply to this comment
- I morn the day when TRUE JOURNALISTS are completely gone. So much of what we watch or read today is hyped to increase ratings. News programs (the big three) and newspapers were the bastions of maintaining freedom from government and corporate malfeasance. Today they have almost been completely usurped by the corporate big-wigs to deliver "news" slanted to their political and/or business likings. Orwell''s "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is almost complete.
- Reply to this comment
- cameraphone,
Your user name gets me into a whole different area of irresponsibility when the internet becomes a form of media. There are pictures and videos posted of somebody assaulting somebody else drivers acting in a dangerous manner and even sexual assault on children. The people who post these are sometimes the perpetrators or their friends. - Reply to this comment
- As I read elsewhere, "TV is the NEW Radio."
- Reply to this comment
- mt1233,
You are not part of the answer, you are part of the problem with the blogosphere.
The internet is by its nature anarchic. On a blog I can call you a child molester or a Nazi and you can do nothing about it. People putting in unfounded accusations on Wikipedia is a good example.
The established media at least have the restraint of having professional journalists as editors. If you read newspapers, you will find a variety of opinions, restrained only by libel considerations. Management usually has little day-to-day involvement. The last major proprietor who attempted to regularly control news was William Randolph Hearst and he died more than 50 years ago.
As to the accusations that the media ignored Palin and McCain''s associations, I don''t know what rock you were hiding under during the campaign. - Reply to this comment
- babooph,
How many years has JE Hoover been dead? Aren''t you living in the past a bit?
Besides much of the censorship was self-censorship. As well, much of the censorship by law was watered down by the Supreme Court while Hoover was alive. - Reply to this comment
- J.E. Hoover was in charge of movie,newspaper ,book,etc. censorship-WHO TAKES CARE OF THIS NOW?
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- libssuckk,
I think you are generalizing. The media has shifted to the left in the past 30 years, but it has been uneven. There are good journalists from both the left and the right. Unfortunately there are unprofessional fanatics in both camps as well.
A professional organization such as a newspaper should attempt to encompass a range of opinions and should keep opinion to opinion pages or bylined articles by experienced journalists with expertise in their field.
The anarchic characteristic of some websites means there may be no attempt at objectivity or balance, so for credibility I still prefer newspapers.
I would also rate live media such as radio and TV as having less credibility than newspapers. - Reply to this comment
- whitemale08,
I agree with most of what you have said. Newspapers should fight back with quality rather than cutting staff. I believe there is still a market for a quality product.
If I ran a newspaper website, I would put in little more than the headlines and then a strong message that if you want to read the whole story, buy the paper.
Where we may part ways is over the issue of objectivity. I prefer traditional American objectivity to the British system where you have Labor, Liberal and Conservative newspapers. I want to know what happened, not somebody''s interpretation of what happened.
Objectivity began in US papers in the Civil War with the formation of the Associated Press. Traditionally, newspapers were corrupt and many printed in their news columns what somebody paid them to put in. - Reply to this comment
- The media like everything else is in a ''race to the bottom''.
As technology was focused on making things cheaper to produce then so was the content.
The end-game for media is the same end-game for restaraunts: ''Self-made production like Self Service gas statios i.e. Youtube''.
There is no profit at the bottom of the food chain but people that owns newspapers, tv stations and radio shows continue to live in fantasy-land.
If we get away from this Cartisian way of thinking where we ''suspend reality for the sake of being objective and optimistic'',
then we will appreciate that reality exists because of the dynamic principals found in the universal laws of nature.
An economic system designed to ''race to the bottom'' will do just that, no matter how you try to modify or fix that dynamic.
Get away from ''consensus'' folks and go with ''reality''. - Reply to this comment
- Telecommute3 is a good example of why electronic communication is destroying the language. He or she has little sentence structure and no idea on what should be capitalized. I would also assume the contribution was full of spelling errors but these were corrected by the system so that the author was no wiser on spelling rules.
If people continue to write in an abbreviated online style, there will be no more great novels, no more scholarly textbooks and, of course no newspapers. - Reply to this comment
- As a Technology Consultant... I too would like to share this video with the many teachers I work with as we look at the changing nature of instruction and the impact digital media is having on education.
- Reply to this comment
- Finally, Somebody over 40 really gets it
and can explain it to those relics of over
40 decision makers still decaying as the
captains of industry !
I am embedding the clip (no, that isn''t anything dirty :-)
at InternetNEWSNETwork.com
The Internet replaces every form of technological
communication and the NewsOsaurs that depend on them.
The NewsPaper, Radio, Television,
and Telephone. And the Communications giants are
losing market share because of ''legacy costs''
and the misinterpretation that ''one way''
communications can be ''copied'' onto the
''two way'' medium of the internet.
How else can you start a Broadcasting company
for free ? Or a Telephone Company for free?
What other communications device let anyone
''borrow'' its full capacity at a $00.00 price ?
4EverGreen13.com is broadcast HiDef
in 138 countries on 62 channels 24/7/365
and doesn''t own a studio a satellite or an antenna.
A complaint I have heard from media is that the
internet ''lacks editorial discipline''.
EBay has a less than 1% fraud rate precisely because
the internet ''edits itself'' at the speed of light.
Only to the ''old ear'' is their this din of
''bloggers in their mother''s basement in pajamas''
that somehow ''create'' the news.
Who reads even a web page anymore ?
If you%u2019re not Googling your query on YouTube
you are completely missing Internet 3.0
The ''most viewed news stories'' list on YouTube has no
resemblance to any editorialized News Source. - Reply to this comment
- As a Technology Consultant... I too would like to share this video with the many teachers I work with as we look at the changing nature of instruction and the impact digital media is having on education.
- Reply to this comment
