An End, and a Beginning, for the Media

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This is the part where I should offer a magic plan to make the media solvent in 2009. Ahem. Sorry. I must have left it in my other pants. Some have suggested making media companies private or nonprofit to ease the money pressures. That could work in some cases. But journalists will need to change too. As Detroit has seen, when people want something else, you can't just order them to buy more SUVs.

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Like the car companies, individual media outlets will probably have to learn to be smaller. And they'll need to see their new-media "problems" as part of the solution. Internet users don't hate the media. In fact, when given the tools by something like Twitter or YouTube, they want to be the media. People want the vetted information the news media offer--and they want to riff on it, respond to it and even, as in Mumbai, add to it. Journalists should embrace that rather than futilely fight it.

This means offering users more ways of interacting, commenting and contributing. It means seeing new media not as the dumbing down of civilization but as a new way of telling stories and even finding stories. And it means recognizing that the audience is no longer passive--it wants and expects to participate, even as it wants help in making sense of the info deluge.

In other words, the media business needs to see that the shovel it got whacked with--the change in the way people communicate and the spreading of that power--is not necessarily a weapon or a means to make our graves. It's just a tool. Time to start digging.

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