by Paul Rule
Vegetables are a natural and necessary part of a well-balanced meal. My mother felt that way and made sure there were veggies on my plate and that I ate them. I grew up listening to radio, watching TV and reading newspapers. For all three, news coverage was a necessary part of their content.
It was there not because their audiences liked it, but because their audiences needed it. This was what made media outlets different from hardware stores. There is nothing wrong with being an honest, hard-working hardware merchant, but it does not involve the public service obligation traditionally associated with media and journalism.
Ever wonder why news audiences are so old these days? They’re the last generations who grew up thinking news was necessary to round out a well-balanced media meal. Younger people are hard to find in the audience because news coverage has been marginalized out of their list of priorities.
Radio was the first to turn programming into a fast food menu. Five minutes of news hourly shrunk to two minutes outside of AM and PM drive, then to no news outside of drive time, then to no news at all. News is a downer. It makes listeners tune to stations that don’t have news. I’d better not carry news on my station either. If people want news, let them listen to the all-news stations. Except that few under the age of 60 do so, and we’ve raised a couple of generations of Americans who, when it comes to knowing what’s going on in their communities, governments and world affairs, are as dumb as a scrapyard full of cast-iron fireplugs.
The transition from print to digital is not the central cause of the newspaper industry meltdown. The problem is that so many of their younger potential readers have little interest in newspaper content whether it’s in print or online. It my parents had removed vegetables from my plate and told me I could find them in the kitchen if I wanted any, a green bean never would have passed my lips.
There is importance in telling people not just what they want to know but also what they need to know. As programmers, we often have lost sight of this and may have killed journalism in the process.
Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.