In this morning’s Washington Post, Frank Ahrens reviewed a new book by Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. Ahrens points to the conventional wisdom of a year ago, that held that the ownership of the major media (meaning radio, television, and music) was overly consolidated. Ahrens avers that the media world has turned upside-down in the past year. Clear Channel is selling media properties, as are the New York Times, Knight Ridder, Walt Disney and others.
And to anybody who listens to or looks at media on the Internet, it’s obvious that there is no more media hegemony. When I was 10 years old, 73 million people saw the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. That was possible because there were only three television networks in 1964. No choice. Getting on Sullivan meant a major show-business career boost–even for performers who weren’t that great.
The Beatles simply could not happen right now. There’s not a single place everybody looks. For every person who is plugged into American Idol, there are three or four (or more) who have no clue what’s happening on it, nor could they care less.
Two years ago, when we “second-wave” podcasters got started, we truly thought we were going to change the media world: “Bring the big media to their knees!” was our cry. About a year ago, that idea began to seem a bit quaint to me.
But now, Clear Channel/Walt Disney/NYT truly are crumbling. And it’s because people listen to “MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, satellite radio, XBox, iPods, et al.”, to quote Frank Ahrens. So it’s not podcasting, per se, that has caused the crumble. But we’re surely part of it.
This is true even as we bash each other about “who’s most important.”
Dave, you’re exactly right about the impact of social networking sites, podcasting, satellite radio and more, things have changes and the FCC needs to update its ownership rules to reflect these realities. In addition, as Ahrens points out, there has been a tremendous deconsolidation movement in the past year and Klinenberg’s book is outdated.
I consult with the NAB on the media ownership issue and we are attempting to confront the many misconceptions that exist about how online media, satellite and cable are affecting th ability of local broadcasters to survive on their own. They are struggling to compete for ad revenue and things will only get worse.
Great post.
Thanks for the comment, Chris.
I think it would be really unsettling to be an independent media owner in the past 5-10 years. Do such people/entities even still exist?
I have always had a fascination with and admiration for local media owners–small radio and television stations, small-town newspapers. But I’m forced to conclude that in this day and age, their role has probably been supplanted by bloggers, podcasters, and other denizens of the online world.
What is lost in this new scheme is a sense of geographical community, of locality. I don’t know exactly how that will be recovered.