dying and desparation
A lot of old media outlets are dying or at least their current business models appear to be dying. There is a lot of talk about reinvention, trying to find new sources of income, or just suing your way to profitability.
Although a business and its business model are closely tied together, they are not one in the same. IBM used to be in the business of selling mainframes and personal computers, but as that business model dried up they restructured themselves into a services company. (Having sold their desktop and laptop operations, hard drive manufacturing, and I believe their mainframes now account for a small part of their overall revenue.)
One thing that has become clear is that as old media sees its business model dying and revenues dropping, you can see its desperation.
Instead of having a long term new business model (or at least a plan), you see outlets trading their reputation for a quick sale. Money now at the cost of long term viability. This manifests itself in the way they appeal to the lowest common denominator. Extreme and attention getting headlines (disproportionate to the magnitude of the story) in the hopes of getting you to buy in, or very fast trendy topics but with little substance.
The coverage of the H1N1 influenza strain is a good example. The conventional strain of influenza kill about 36 000 Americans a year, however there has not been a single death due to H1N1 in America yet. World wide, I don’t believe the number of people killed from H1N1 has reached 1000. In conventional media outlets however, we see words like pandemic and talks of world wide outbreak. Some people even talk about the possibility of H1N1 being some form of biological attack.
In fact there is probably a lot more danger in the fear and panic that is being generate by this hype machine than the actual virus. Much like the year 2000 bug, I was many times more worried about how the people would react than how the machinery would.
All this disruption and unjustified fear, only to get a few more ratings or sales. This trick can work for a while, but eventually it will be like the boy who cried wolf. People will just stop listening, and then what business model can you have as a media outlet when nobody listens to you.