Week 6 Media Blog

                A concept that really got my attention in this week’s reading of WWGD is the transition papers must go through from a medium focused on mass appeal, into one that appeals to a wide variety of specific interests. “The mass market is dead. Long live the mass of niches.” as Jeff Jarvis puts it. This change from mass to niche comes after first converting from physical to digital, i.e., papers to the internet. It's an obvious innovation, but honestly, I don’t even know what people use newspapers for anymore, aside from making papier-mâché volcanoes and cutting out letters for ransom notes. Viewing news online is just more convenient, but there are significant adjustment that need to be made when moving focus from a newspaper to a news site. News organization must keep in mind that the internet gives users the ability to specifically search for what topics they want to hear about. Simply transferring the text from a newspaper onto a website won’t properly cater to this new found freedom, and the text itself will still suffer from the issue that newspapers aim for broad appeal from a very different audience than they're likely to get on a news site. The solution is to offer more information regarding a wider array of specialized subjects. In time, the large amount of small audiences the site attracts will outnumber the singular audience attracted through physical media. This pleases me, because I’m a guy who’s seen Citizen Kane over a dozen times and would prefer not to go outside unless my house is on fire. So yeah, I can appreciate the value of accommodating a niche set of interests.

                One of the complaints Jeff Jarvis replies to about the internet is that it is filled with inaccuracies. He dismisses this criticism by pointing out that the internet provides ways of easily verifying information through Google searches. I bring this up because I believe there is a fairly recent news story that demonstrates the internet’s factual resilience, and it involves the television show I’ve watched longer than any other, South Park. One of the newest episodes of South Park centered around the self-righteous people who write restaurant reviews on the website Yelp. Shortly after the episode aired, news spread that, in response to the episode, Yelp was suing South Park for $10 million. The only problem with the story was that it was complete and total bullshit. The original article came from a fake news site, which looked legit enough to trick people into spreading it through social media. This is a moment where I was proud of the mainstream media, because after the rumor was big enough, several news outlets and blogs wrote articles correcting the rumor. There were even a few websites that fell for the rumor, then eventually corrected the information in the same article, The Week for example. And although maybe I should be disappointed that the story was spread in the first place, I prefer to just be happy that the story was corrected quickly, and that now readers will be able to get factual information. Let it never be said I’m not an optimist.