A research team found that students who media multitask -- like watching television and posting online -- do a poor job of both. That's why I still get most of my news from printed newspapers even though I spend more time looking at online news sources.
Among the things that tells me as I think of current media trends is to question the television gods who decreed that screens must be cluttered with four or five elements (crawls, boxes, characters promoting other shows, etc.), something that's always annoyed me since they detract so much from the picture, which is why I'm watching television in the first place. I can't help but believe that's one reason why television watching is down. It also makes me wonder about the "hot" new idea of televisions that are offering online access as well.
One thing about the free market is that it offers lessons about consumers' likes and dislikes. A lingering concern I've had about media is that its managers seem to ignore those lessons. I remember after the start of USA Today when conventional wisdom in newspapers were that people didn't have time to read so keep everything short. One result is today's newspapers that are losing readers. I expect that this fall's official circulation figures will show that the Journal Sentinel, which has cut back severely on content, will have lost more readers than any time in recent years. Give people less, and charge them more, and they'll find alternatives. The same for television where all the happy talk and non-news have turned once rock-solid viewership for evening broadcasts into great viewership for the "Daily Show" and other alternatives to news. Where once CNN could be counted on as a place for news, today's it's filled with the same kind of fluff as the rest of the cable "news" channels -- and viewership is way off. Will today's media managers learn some of those free market lessons before they're out of business?
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