Canada's Debate

The subject of the decline of traditional media (or “tradmed” for the people who spend all day at their computers, yet still think their time is too valuable to type words in their entirety) has once again become passe in Canadian and global blogging circles. Theories of course abound, with the most popular seeming to be that the voice of bloggers has wrested the truth from media, which is a corporate construct of some sort.

To be entirely honest, this strikes me as a giant load of maple-walnut crunch textured bullshit. “News” has two elements, facts and a . The simple reality of the news marketplace we live in is that bloggers are for the most part incapable of providing both at the same time. This is not meant as an overt criticism of bloggers as a whole, but rather a recognition of the fact that we usually don’t have the resources AND the journalistic skills to both. There are exceptions to be true, but they are outliers and not exemplars of our group.

Unfortunately, the traditional media has become similarly crippled by a sensationalistic race to the bottom. entrenched in a pattern where they cater to a market which is more interested in headlines than stories. Newspapers complain that their readers are taking advantage of their free online content and foregoing print publications; the subtext of this complaint is that once someone is looking at headlines online the newspaper cannot hold their attention. True or not, my sympathy is extremely limited; for years print publications have been reducing their content to easy-to-digest fear-gasms about crime, corruption and death. Is it any surprise that we are part of a generation that doesn’t want to dig deep in a story, when the newspapers that showed up on our doorsteps as kids screamed shallow factoids that required no investigation or elucidation?

The newspaper industry isn’t dead… and isn’t necessarily dying. The industry is grappling with a new market however, one that it fostered.