Is It a News Death Spiral or Simply a Renewal?
Anyone who has been reading this blog, knows that Phil Meyer, author of the Vanishing Newspaper, gave newspapers an early Wake Up Call, by talking about the death spiral. Unfortunately, now it sounds like a prophesy. However, Clyde Bentley, University of Missouri professor of convergence journalism, sees it not as a death, but as a renewal.
Here is how Meyer, pictured to the left, opened his talk Are Newspapers in a Death Spiral? at our Wake Up Call conference in San Antonio:
The answer is yes, and theres probably nothing we can do about it. This is a picture of the death spiralits not a spiral, its more of a straight line. I showed an earlier version of this chart in this same hotel about ten years ago, to a meeting of newspaper feature writers, and one of them looked at that and pointed to the chart and said, No, that is not happening. Denial is a pretty good way to deal with something like this. As Garrison Keillor once said, Some problems are so bad, the only thing to do is to look at them and deny them.
Here is the start of Bentley’s rebuttal:
My whole experience says this isnt a death spiral. This is the dance of the phoenix. Things burn up, and they come back new. The bad part of that is, its not a very pleasant thing to see, burning up. And its gotta hurt like hell when it happens, right? But it comes back as something new and beautiful, and it saves the day. . . . and thats one of the things I want to look at today.
Read both of their points of view at our Wake Up Call Final Report page–when there download the whole final report, like the conference day itself, it is packed with information.
Tomorrow: “Expanding The Definition of News Media Trust”–A Jay Rosen-Led Conversation.
