The Corporatization of the Media: A Reality

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The Corporatization of the Media A Reality
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Corporatization

• BIG SIX AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom,
  NewsCorp, Bertelsmann, and General Electric
• AOL-TW controls CNN CNN off-shoots
• Disney controls ABC
• Viacom controls CBS
• NewsCorp controls Fox News Channel
• GE controls NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC
• DowJones controls WSJ 2, FEER, newswires,
  partner w/ CNBC

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MONEY MEANS...

• HIGHER EMPLOYEE MORALE
• MORE RESOURCES
• WIDER COVERAGE
• INFLUENCE, POWER
• SYNERGY ACROSS MEDIA

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Put business executives rather than journalists
in charge of the news division...
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WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

• LA TIMES and Staples Center do secret deal to
  split advertising profits from special edition of
  its Sunday magazine devoted to stories on the
  Staples Center
• Barbara Walters and cohorts at The View turn
  eight of their shows into paid infomercials for
  Campbells Soup
• 60 Minutes decides not to air its interviews with
  Jeffrey Wiegand, the whistle-blowing tobacco
  executive, nor its damaging reports on Mobil
• CBSs Early Show spends considering time
  interviewing non-survivors of its reality
  hit, Survivor
• NBC spends most time covering 1996 Summer
  Olympics, which was telecast on its network
• ABC News does 3 interviews w/ a sock puppet (2
  on Good Morning America and 1 on Nightline). The
  sock was a corporate mascot for pets.com, a
  website that had its major investor Disney

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Running a news organization as a business does
not have to go against journalistic integrity
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• WHEN THINGS GO RIGHT
• Dow Jones Code of Conduct The central premise
  of this code is that Dow Jones reputation for
  quality and for the independence and integrity of
  our publications is the heart and soul of our
  enterprise This is a financial premise, not a
  purely journalistic one. Dow Jones cannot
  prosper if our customers cannot assume that our
  analyses represent our best independent judgments
  rather than our preference, or those of our
  sources, advertisers or information providers.
• Bringing business accountability to the newsroom
  involved bringing the language of business as
  well. Readers and viewers customers.
  Understanding them marketing. News customer
  service.
• Bob Ingle, exec editor of San Jose Mercury News
  The best editors are marketers. Thats what I
  tried to do as an editorget the bloody staff to
  listen to the audience.
• BUT rather than selling customers content,
  newspeople are building a relationship w/ their
  audience built on their values, judgment,
  authority, courage, professionalism, and
  commitment to community. Providing this creates
  a bond w/ the public, which the news organization
  then rents to advertisers.

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THE IDEAL
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Remember Things were not perfect under private
ownership
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COMMON COMPLAINTS

• Authoritarian management system in which editors
  were like children before the powerful father
• The use of the papers coverage for owners
  personal needs
• The way that editorials were established at the
  flagship paper and printed in all others in a
  chain regardless of how this might fit with local
  conditions
• The commingling of resources so that a
  photographer might find himself detailed to shoot
  family photos of the owners
• The shameless willingness to give advertisers
  privileged access to the papers news columns

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JOURNALISM IS A BUSINESS

• Bill Kovach, Neiman Foundation, former editor of
  Atlanta Journal and Constitution and Washington
  editor of New York Times Inherent in the First
  Amendment freedom provided to the owners of a
  newspaper is an obligation to provide the kind of
  public-service information a self-governing
  people need. The business of a newspaper, he
  adds, is to provide the funds to meet this social
  purpose.
• Colonel McCormick, Northwestern University, used
  to shock students by telling them that the first
  duty of a free press is to make a profitHe
  understood that to have the wherewithal to
  succeed in the marketplace of ideas, a newspaper
  has to succeed in the economic marketplace.

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PROPER BUSINESS MODEL OF A NEWS ORGANIZATION

• In the end, the product youre selling has been
  commoditized-- news and information is
  everywhere, cheaply available.
• What an organization has to understand is that
  the actual product is the INTEGRITY of the
  organization. This is what you want to be paid
  for.
• Consumers play a role in directing advertising
  dollars to properly value integrity. When
  integrity is not important to the consumer,
  offering quality news that is of social value
  fails as a business model.