The New Media

So I’m thinking of starting my own media company. Entrepreneurs aren’t people who make money – they’re people who solve problems. One problem we have is that big news does not cover events well. When I say big news, I mean publications like the CBC and the New York Times. Their journalists are really derided on twitter for the way they cover people and ideas.

In journalism, you have two things to start off with when you first start writing: your audience, and your intent. Journalists believe that they have a monopoly on their audience, and thus they can do whatever they want with their intent: they can slant their articles in any way they please.

Nobody could really do anything about this back when the internet didn’t exist. The audience only had the news as their source of information, so they could not go and see what the subject of the news was saying (or not saying), so they had to trust the news to get it right.

But as time went on, new technologies emerged  where people didn’t have to look at what the media was saying about this or that subject. They could just look at what the subject himself was saying, and make up their own minds on the subject. As a result of this, the media has had to fight to keep their share of the audience’s attention, and it started an utter death spiral.

What the media’s now doing is becoming more and more sensationalistic, click batey, and extreme, which in turn makes the media less credible than it ever was before, because they’re moving further and further away from their original mission: representing the truth of reality to people. Now, they distort it more and more, and people can and do check to see whether they’re distorting it or not, and viewership declines because it turns out that they are distorting it a lot.

Stay tuned for my solution!

 

 

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