MSM in turmoil

Howard Kurtz provides an interesting, amusing window into the confusion, fear and incomprehension in the MSM as it tries to figure out what's happening to the news business.

Arguments about what readers want have become almost an obsession after an 18-year slide in national newspaper circulation and an economic squeeze that is prompting such giants as the New York Times, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer to cut newsroom jobs.

Almost any blogger could have predicted what he describes, except maybe this:

But political reporter Dana Milbank is unimpressed, writing that with few exceptions, "this has been an elaborate exercise in navel gazing."

Who needs bloggers when your own employees are taking such shots?

The overall picture shows a lot of self-doubt, isolation from general society, and a reflexive reliance on analysis, much of which is irrelevant. It's obvious that fewer people read newspapers these days because they have other ways of getting information. And a lot of us these days just don't care about anything more than sports. Newpapers take a long time to get through. How hard is all this to understand?

Maybe the biggest point is that we now have much more 'interactive' media in the form of the Internet. Newspapers will never be able to match that. I think that a blog model is the future, Yahoo with a comments section.

What seems so typical is this:

The rhetoric heated up when Pearlstein wrote that Post staffers should "admit that a lot of what we do, and how we do it, is driven by a notion of good journalism that has more to do with 'dominating' a story and keeping up with the competition or, on occasion, winning prizes, than it does with what our readers need and want. . . . Too many of our stories . . . [have] 'obligation' written all over them."

Pearlstein called for a smaller, edgier paper and complained that the opinion pages have become "too tame, too predictable, too R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-L-E and, at times, downright boring."

Instead of R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-L-E, I would say L-I-B-E-R-A-L or O-R-T-H-O-D-O-X, but maybe that's what he means. Whatever it is, I think MSM's problem is that it is aimed more at itself than at what the rest of the people are interested in reading.