There is a new digital “social”
platform. It is called Ello. It purports to be ad free and independent of
influence. Started by a designer, it has attracted many talented graphic and
design artists, and because of this there is some really beautiful work to see
on Ello.
But there are other contributors
too, including a page from Bloomberg which I elected to follow. In keeping with
the general artistic bent of Ello, the Bloomberg page is populated with many
beautiful charts and diagrams and pictures … and very few words.
It was here that I saw a chart
depicting the decline in TV news audiences across the USA over a 20+ year
period. My gaze was instantly arrested. TV news audience decline? While the
explanation centered on news anchors and studio infighting, I saw one thing
only. I saw newsprint written all
over the chart. To me it echoed what I knew to be true in the newsprint medium:
A little rough mental arithmetic
showed that the TV news audiences had come close to being cut in half. This was
profound erosion. More importantly it had come on the back of growth of TV as a
medium.
There was only one thing to
conclude. “News” was the weakness. Surely a decline in TV news audiences
alongside a decline in newspaper readership eliminates the medium as the cause
of the trend? I thought of newspapers.
Could it be true that the news part
of newspaper is the issue, not newspapers per se?
In the past half century,
increasingly it is argued that the news we see and read is the news that the
media elects to call news. We are told it is NEWS and therefore it becomes
news. Could this ‘push’ model of communication be dying? News for me is new
information that I can integrate in my thinking and my choices. It might even
build some character and resonate with my personality. News is what should
smooth out some of the rough edges and possibly make me a little more
interesting to others.
We can pontificate about what is
news and what is not news and then we can debate about how we get news. I chat
to my children who neither watch the news show on TV nor read newspapers, yet they
say newspapers seem cool. They say they would read them if there was a
reflection of hipster culture. If there was something they could keep. If it
was beautiful. They actually seem to
like the concept of a newspaper. Or should that be daypaper or citypaper?
With the growth in digital media
audiences, the drive for bite sized info chunks and staccato communication, we
know that much of modern dialogue is around events and feelings and reactions and consumptive experiences. We seek out the specifics that help us make
better choices to get through the day.
In light of this, much of what is
presented as news is noise. TV news audiences declined because the news they
reported was not needed. Perhaps similarly with newspaper readership.
But no one would say that TV is
anachronism. And the news reported can change. Indeed it seems to be doing
that. In the chart above there is a turning point.
