I think one aspect of the modern press that doesn’t get enough attention—either among folks in the media or folks critiquing it—is the transition from the fundamental scarcity being information to information being in abundance and the fundamental scarcity being mediation.

That is a very telling quote indeed. I’d just add that perhaps the most obvious example of mediation at a global scale (and very relevant in Japan) is mediation between languages, and in particular translation. More to say on that but will have to wait till another time.

I was less satisfied with Season 2 myself. The Wire presents some of the most layered cops and drug deals (all characters, really) of all races, genders, and sexual orientations that I have seen in TV, movies, etc. ... except Eastern Europeans who simply appear as shifty masterminds. Of course, as you mentioned, when criticising The Wire, it is best to think about what other TV shows look like.

Maybe. However, NPR is strapped for resources and also relies on academics (who are being directed away from public service by increasing “publish or perish” demands, the fantastic PBS New Hour also relies on academics) for a great deal of its coverage. Also, with something reliant on donations, there is always the danger that the donations will increasingly come from the right, along with demands that their ideological stance be reflected. Is it viable in the long run? I really do hope so.

“and you have taken a completely different animal (niche interests) and applied it to the issue at hand (national/regional mainstream media)”

The example that I used can be described as niche but, as it stands, this along with several other fields such as film criticism, are the only ones that we can point to as media environments that function almost completely online at the present time. As I indicated above, I actually hope that these may not be harbingers. However, to use another example, many of the best US film critics have been cut in the last 5 years (even by critical leaders like “Village Voice”) and there is plenty of analysis out there to suggest that they are being replaced by the type of everyman criticism that has “Return of the King” as the greatest movie of all time one year and “The Dark Knight” another. These “greatest of all time” proclamations may not hurt like flawed Iraq war coverage, but they do speak to the same problem – a lack of context and broader perspective.

“The cuts they have made have largely been to please investors who will not accept any decrease in profitability.”

Correct, but my fear is that, already cut to the bone in a time of marginal profitability, if/when the real collapse comes (and it IS coming, just maybe not in Japan), there will be nothing left.

If you ever work in Washington, you will soon meet a class of people who peddle for-pay newsletters offering their inside scoop on whatever issue they are covering. Things like this and in fact lots of information in Japan are rightly locked in subscription schemes. That isnt quite what we are talking about here.

By saying that we have little choice but to work with the current system, you make a sensible argument. I only offered up NHK style reforms to point out that the doomsaying doesnt make much sense a lot of the time.

However it ignores the fact that newspapers are still basically profitable. The cuts they have made have largely been to please investors who will not accept any decrease in profitability.

From the American Journalism Review:

“The newspaper industry remains highly profitable by comparison with most other businesses. Bad as 2007 has been, the publicly reporting companies still produced an average operating-profit margin of nearly 16 percent in the first half of the year—a level many businesses can never hope to achieve. Still, the average profit margin has been in steady decline since 2002, when it was 22.3 percent.

“That newspapers have been able to maintain such high margins has not been due to improving business but to cost-cutting and, recently, a decline in newsprint costs. But no industry can cut its way to future success. At some point, the business must improve.

“Whether newspapers will be able to meld a combination of print and online into a sustainable and thriving business model is a large question. In newspapers’ favor is the fact that they are the only form of media organized to gather mass amounts of news and to provide a forum for serious analysis of important issues. Anyone who loves democracy should hope this will continue.

“But clearly newspapers now find themselves ensnared in a competition for readers and advertising that is as unfamiliar as it is intense. A sure consequence of this will be lower profitability.”
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4416

“managed by a non-partisan board of directors that sounded like it allocated resources using a system more typical of academia.”

You know, I really do agree with you guys about everything that you are saying – it would be wonderful if all of this were possible. I like utopian suggestions. I`m being a devil`s advocate against what I would like to see come to pass because I also feel that no matter how bad the current order of things is, radical alternatives are probably not going to be accepted and thus positive change needs to be worked within the current system. An academia-like journalism funding push would be wonderful, but how does this ever come about when Academic itself is under siege? Tenure is under threat in the United States. Liberal arts support lags far behind business schools. 50% of classes in the country are taught by poorly paid adjunct faculty who will never have real research support – with shifts in academia meaning that many young scholars will never see a living wage, a pension, or healthcare I have to doubt the feasibility of this system to help solve journalism`s problems.

There is also the non-partisan thing – is this even a realistic consideration in the United States? When this cannot even be close to guaranteed in the judiciary, I would be hesitant to place journalism in the same hands. How long before they start demanding a conservative for every liberal, a creationist for every one of those people who believe in, you know, that “science” stuff?

The Wire – The important thing about Simon was that he “felt fired”. This has come out in interviews and in the 5th season (I consider it to be stronger than the 2nd). I think that the 5th season does contribute to our understanding of how fuc#ed Baltimore is in two important ways – cycles of violence and a really firm illustration of how political ambitions mean that those in need are always going to be sold out in the end. The promises in season 4 needed to be betrayed in season 5. In addition, season 5 also offers “The Corner”`s redemption story in a nutshell, and some very moving moments.

You are correct that Simon`s best work has come in books, but let`s think a bit about the context of the production of those works of reportage (these are “journalism” as well, of course, just as a lot of the best Japanese journalism is published by the major newspapers in their paperback series) for a minute. “Homicide” was only possible because of the access that his Sun position allowed him and the city contacts that he made. “Homicide” was also written while on leave from the Sun. In short, Simon had a chance to do something daring (Homicide is, in my opinion, one of the best books of the 1980s) that could very well have failed from a financial standpoint, because of support from the Sun and knowledge that he had a job to go back to (a form of tenure, very simliar to what allows an academic like Chomsky to do what he does). My major concern is not for the profit margins of the mainstream press. I simply hope that people doing good reportage will continue to be able to earn a living wage. The best way to ensure that reporters are vulnerable is to make it difficult for them to eat.

Allow me to give a concrete example of the potential dangers of free information circulation online. There is one sphere of the American media that has gone almost 100% online – the boxing press. Boxing is in an odd position in American society – it enjoys significant niche popularity but is largely looked past by the mainstream. In response to a decline in quality boxing reporting, a number of individuals started websites that now produce what I would estimate to be 95% plus of all boxing features written in the United States. One of these sites, Maxboxing.com, charges a relatively large membership fee and has made about 60% of their content members only. This is necessary to ensure the the feature writers are paid a living wage. I fear that if the mainstream press vanishes and blogs, etc. take over, those sources are just going to consolidate commercially and form a new commercial media. Why is this scary? In my opinion, it could wipe out committed (partially anyway) liberal bastions like the New York Times and replace them with a popularizing online media mill that may be even WORSE.

What could this look like? Maxboxing had a big, big problem a few years ago. Some athletes had decided that they didn`t like the criticisms that they were reading on Maxboxing so they decided to grant exclusive access to another site – Boxingtalk. As a result, Boxingtalk started asking interview questions like “What makes you so great?” Complete softball stuff. I`m not confident that online reportage really has the potential to put pressure on promoters, companies, etc. to guarentee their ability to ask hard questions. The mainstream press does not do this all of the time, of course, but they do manage to do it some of the time. In this way, the one part of the American media that had gone almost completely online pretty much engaged in a race to the bottom content wise, just to guarentee themselves access.

Another danger – in the race to generate revenue, the third big boxing site in the United States – Fightnews – has actually ceased to differentiate between its articles and PAID ADVERTISMENTS. Reading the site, you cannot tell which is which. The vulnerability of alternative media to this type of thing is scary. This type of thing is also notable in the J-Blog sphere. I don`t want to name names, but it seems like the most popular J-Blog out there gears its “news” toward the type of image of Japan that supports its major advertisers – porn through the mail and various dating schemes.

I think that when we look at a case study of the mainstream press dying off and reportage going online, we see the emergence of a system that is rife with even more serious problems.

I hope, however, that this is not a harbinger and that some version of the vision being put foward by Roy and Adam here actually comes about.

And let me emphasize—the idea that mainstream media are too precious to face competition from the Internet is pervasive but poisonous. The mainstream media are massively consolidated and highly efficient operations (not to mention politically connected). If they cannot position themselves to monetize the Internet while fulfilling their public mission to inform, they have only themselves to blame.

The big newspapers face the end of above-market profit margins, NOT extinction. And as the consistently loss-making Washington Times’ very existence makes clear, there is a powerful need to broadcast a worldview that can mitigate profit motives, as can public interest. Newspapers have managed 20% margins (as opposed to 16% margins in the overall stock market) but with the end of classified revenue and erosion of some subscriber bases might see those margins fall to half that. And guess what, those kinds of profits are completely acceptable to other businesses if NYT or whoever doesn’t want them.

In Japan, this is doubly true. They can heap all the epithets they want on bloggers or baselessly bemoan a “decline in prose reading” by young people, but the fact remains they enjoy considerable protections from competition that may in fact be contributing to a rise in alternative sources.

At most (though this would be unlikely to sit well with most Americans or economists), these institutions’ long histories of public service might justify some kind of time window to allow them to adapt to changing times. Unfortunately the newspapers’ privileged status is not strictly conditioned on their usefulness as institutions. Quite the contrary, their privileged position has bred complacency and knee-jerk moves to protect their status. In the meantime, average Japanese people suffer. The dearth of real content from the top providers helps make the Japanese Internet seem less attractive, while the real punishment of members who don’t fit in with the elite (I’ll mention Horie without getting into the details of his specific crimes, but let’s just agree that he did himself no favors making powerful enemies) sends the message that you’ll never get rich challenging the establishment (though you might score a brief Keidanren membership before the ax falls).

The fifth season shows how a newsroom can be completely clueless about what is going on in the street (and extremely vulnerable to lying sources), but if the Internet’s effects on journalism truly made Baltimore a worse place he did a really poor job of making the case. My feeling is that traditional journalism failed then and it continues to fail now.

To give you an idea of what I mean, if you watch the film Cocaine Cowboys (an amazing documentary of the early history of the Miami cocaine trade), you can see that local news outlets did an decent job of reporting the facts on the ground but were powerless to do much about the booming drug business all around them. We can blame the media for enabling the powerful but often they can scream foul until they are blue in the face and it makes not a lick of difference.