This will be the year the mainstream media complex — specifically managers and editors — finally begins to understand the ramifications of losing their audience’s trust.
It’s a loss that transcends the Trump and fake news phenomena. Rather, it’s about corrupting forces to which journalists themselves are largely oblivious. Most of the blame, I think, lies with structural, economic, and bureaucratic forces that have come to underestimate editorial risks and misallocate resources in a bid to maximize returns from reach, digitalization, and standardization.
Such forces unwittingly favor — even in the most upstanding organizations — predictable clicks drawn from knee-jerk, and often erroneous, takes that ride the consensus wave, while sensationalizing content and narrowing the public debate spectrum. The result is an eschewing of contrarian quality reads that might be slower to come to market but are much harder to discredit over time because they have been properly researched, considered, and tested. It is simply safer to ride the consensus wave, even in the supposedly high-quality and deeply researched section of the media.
As in banking, there are only so many times a journalistic outlet can misprice a story and suffer a proverbial default before readers begin to lose trust in the publisher in question (such as when the story you’ve been pushing turns out not to be true or badly misinformed). In terms of abuse of public trust, today is analogous to the post-2008 era in banking. Eventually, eyeballs and subscriptions will flow to more credible competition. Indeed, the biggest reason they haven’t yet abandoned the mainstream in sizable volume is that a credible competitor that addresses most of these issues on an economically scaled basis doesn’t yet exist....
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