The Zombie Media

Hold the front page!

They are the walking dead.

Conventional media companies, that is.

They are already dead, they just don’t know it.

“I’m still alive” they say.

Tear off an arm… or fire 30% of your editorial staff… but they keep coming at you.

“See. I’m still alive!”

Rip off another arm….

“still alive”, despite the blood all over the floor.

They are dead.

Newspapers.  TV networks.

The undead.

It’s just that no one has told them yet.

They are on life support. They keep cutting their journalism staffs, keep reducing the content in the peculiar hope that this, somehow, will keep them alive just one more day.  Or they take to ‘aggregating’ – eating the brains of others.

It doesn’t mean that journalism is dead. Far from it. But the conventional instutions clearly are.

And it doesn’t mean that there isn’t an appetite for quality reporting and information. That’s stil there too. What no longer works is their architecture, their overhead, their fixed costs. They have a lot of stuff that is killing them that they don’t need, like buildings, or a lot of management, or TV news crews.  So what do you do?

You have to shoot them in the head.

It’s the only thing that works.

You have to free the journalists to do what they do and to connect directly with their audiences, and you have to spend the income that you do get on the content, not the building or the bloated management or the totally unnecessary technical staff.