The perils of the media revolution

It goes without saying that the digital revolution has rightfully earned a lot of praise. Thanks to YouTube, anyone with a camera and editing software (or, as one independent filmmaker using Apple’s $5 iMovie app recently demonstrated, with just an iPhone) can publish short films to the masses. More strikingly, last year the accessibility of Twitter allowed the Iranian people to broadcast images of their fight against the oppressive regime of the mullahs to the world.

But is our generation, as Grossman wrote four years ago, “so ready” for a world in which the free flow of information allows independently generated content to replace rather than supplement media provided by more traditional institutions?

It’s not so hard to imagine this happening. Just look at the state of the news industry. It didn’t take long for people to become accustomed to accessing information from traditional print outlets online for free. But the free-access, ad-based business model just hasn’t worked out for those companies. The New York Times recently admitted as much when it announced the imminent return of its online pay wall. Revenue from online ads alone just can’t subsidize the cost of original reporting from scores of domestic and international bureaus. It can’t pay for the traditional news culture, which prizes independent fact checking and emphasizes, above all else, a commitment to high journalistic standards.

The winners in the new world of journalism seem to be the aggregators and networks of bloggers, the Drudge Reports and Huffington Posts of the world. The online revolution has enabled them to project enormous influence with a relatively light footprint. This empowers individuals and small teams to do jobs that really should be done by large-scale institutions if we are to expect adherence to high journalistic standards. Sensational headlines are the norm for the most successful of these sites, and fact checking of other news outlets’ stories is considered a time-wasting luxury for an aggregator in the 24-hour news cycle. The traditional journalistic thoroughness of old media might have prevented the Shirley Sherrod fiasco this summer, but for individual bloggers such as Andrew Breitbart, such attention to detail simply isn’t worthwhile given the scale of their operations.

For now, the entrenched institutions of other media industries have fared better than those of journalism, but that may not last. Already, many from our generation think nothing of illegally downloading music and movies. And like the purveyors of free content in the early days of online journalism, Hulu has helped condition us to expect the ability to watch our favorite shows for free online. If the free-to-consume model collapses for Hulu as it has for print media’s online operations, the site’s legacy may end up being that it gave society an insatiable appetite for free television.

Even if we continue to pay cable bills, buy music and go to the movies, our children, born long after their parents first shared files illegally, are less likely to. For them, illegal downloads of their favorite shows may become the default way to watch, forcing networks to make massive cuts in the production of original programming. Eventually the networks may consolidate and shutter, and content generated by individuals and small operations may become the only sustainable model for television. The quantity generated by them might be overwhelming, but the quality would take a massive hit.

Of course, this process isn’t inevitable for television, Hollywood and the record labels. But this is a plausible enough scenario to be worth fearing. Perhaps some future generation more familiar with funny YouTube videos than network-produced half-hour sitcoms will look back at Grossman’s 2006 Time piece and wonder if the era of cultural tastemakers who “predigested” content was so bad after all — if perhaps the free flow and creation of content wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Jacob Reses is a sophomore from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.