PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

HOWARD KURTZ LEAVING POST FOR OBSCURE WEBSITE, WORLD COMES TO END

From David Carr’s brilliant column about Howard Kurtz leaving the WashPost to go to the Daily Beast website:

“...he announced he was leaving his privileged perch to become the Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast, a two-year-old toddler of the new digital press conceived by Tina Brown and owned by IAC, run by Barry Diller. Mr. Kurtz’s lane change evinced gasps reminiscent of when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. “

The rest of Carr’s column deals with the emergence of the web as a primary news transmission system and the fact that several “big name” journalists have decided to try the web as a primary place of employment over print.

Carr’s column is worthwhile and brilliantly written. The idea that late middle age journalists are part of some revolution by moving to the web is a bit silly, even if it fills time at coffee breaks at print media offices. First, for those who are, say, past 55, it is not so radical to jump ship. For one thing, they have, have they not?, seen the writing on the wall and watched a long, sad parade of colleagues leaving print for the unemployment line and early retirement?

I would argue, in fact, that even in previous generations, reporters and editors who were nearing their 60th birthdays had really only two main choices: try something new or hang on in a kind of semi-retirement on the job until the real deal became  possible. It is just a fact that people slow down, that the allure of reporting and editing starts to fade over time and the dreams of big stories and big breaks also declines. People start to realize that they have already done most of what they will ever do or become disillusioned that they will never hit the highs they once had in mind as 25 year old dreamers. It happens.

Carr goes on to say that print, even in the emerging age of digital, is still a wonderful thing. So it is. So, too, is being able to broadcast a network newscast, available to the whole nation at once. All of these “traditional media” forms are being rushed to a premature death by an over eager view of the future and by the stock market. The Market has hit “old media” and hit them hard. It decided that the glory days were in the past. This is not true, but it is true for them, so people who run the media empires of print and networks now dance to their tune, trying to prove they are something other than a newspaper or television network in the hope that the stock will stay up a bit and not sink to the penny stock level and be delisted by the exchanges. 

The Market wants stocks it can sell, stocks that are going up and up. To hell with the rest. There is no excitement in a company that makes ten or twenty percent profit on sales per year. The Market wants forty, fifty percent or at least a lie that forty percent is right around the corner. Growth stocks are the only kind that matter any more, so newspapers and traditional media have been sent packing.

All of this, in many ways, is ignorant in the extreme. It reminds of when Bill Clinton, reacting to the Republicans taking Congress in 1994, said that he was “still relevant” as president of the United States. Yeah? I guess he was. He still had, among other things, the power of war and peace in his hands.

A few years ago, I thought newspapers would be around for another 30, even fifty years. Now, I am not so sure. I would place a heavy, quick bet on 10 to 20 years of continued success and, also, that the biggest and most nimble of the old media companies will make the  transition, fully, to the digital age. 

Part of what is being mourned is the time when old media ruled the world, when  what was said on the CBS Evening News or in the major newspapers reverberated in every power center. Now, the edge is gone. The game has changed and “the big boys” aren’t so big any more. Hey, they are still in charge of the nut house or whatever you want to call this crazy, mixed up game of American journalism.

Doug Terry, 10.19.20

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