Skip to main content

The End of Truth

When Journalism and Entertainment Collide "Entertainalism"


We have grown up thinking that what it is reported in the news is truth.  We call news media the fourth estate. It has the power to change hearts and minds, and to that end, keep the government in check. But what is considered news today? And who is dictating the news? 


The need for ratings and surviving in a new digital economy has changed the game.  News media organizations are wrestling to make a living.  Advertising is not enough to pay the rent. The subscription model has yet to work. We just have to look at the NY Times' ad revenue, which has gone from almost $800 million in 2009 to $660 million in 2013.







News media is measured by the size of the audience. To be relevant, they are going the “extra mile” to get people's attention. You don’t have to look further that the Brian Williams debacle. He changed the story over the years to get more attention and he is not alone. Fox and MSNBC tend to provide two different perspectives on the same story to appeal to their respective bases. They also have different sets of priorities when it comes to news.

This means than more often than what we’d like to think, news is dictated by ratings.  This is not too far from entertainment, which uses data to assess audience preferences and analyze behaviors to dial up what matters and get people's attention, and to that end, get more business.

This environment has created a more skeptical audience.  Since 2002, every major news outlet’s believability rating has suffered a double-digit drop, except for local daily newspapers and local TV news. The New York Times was not included in this survey until 2004, but its believability rating has fallen by 13 points since then.


Today, news is not anyone's property. We are all publishers with an agenda. It is up to people to define their truth in a world where it is hard to draw a line between journalism and entertainment "entertainalism."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adidas kills TV. Now, let’s debate

The News: Adidas is ditching TV for digital. The company is looking to boost its e-commerce revenues from $1.06 billion in 2016 to $4.25 billion by 2020 — and Adidas wants to use digital channels to get there. The Rationale: Fish where the fish are. Younger consumers don't watch TV anymore. They spend most of their time on their mobile devices. The Controversy: Why do they want to ditch a medium that is allegedly more "critical" to the brand and that generates more sales than digital? Here we have the Debate between TV and digital: Media Consumption TV: People are watching TV now more than ever.  Digital: People are consuming media more than ever, but mostly through digital devices. The Fact: In 2017, people are projected to spend 6 hours on digital – with the majority being mobile devices - while only spending 4 hours consuming television according to the eMarketer forecast. Younger viewers watch 2.5 times more internet video than TV. Consumers aged 13-24 watch 12.1 hours …
Post a Comment
Read more

How Cool Brands Stay Hot: Aim for Love, Not Likes

Love is an unconditional emotion while like is a more watered-down version of love. Loving someone means that he or she means everything to you while liking someone implies that you are only happy being with that person. Love involves deeper, stronger emotions, while like is more of a tender feeling towards that special someone. In a world of infinite choices, love is everything. Like is a nice to have.  Today, we live in a world of abundance, where people intent to create content surpass their time to consume it. Video content is much easier and cheaper to produce than at any other time in history. YouTube sees 400 hours of video uploaded every minute. Facebook has more than 250,000 status updates in the same span. We could never read and see everything online.  With unlimited possibilities and limited time, we pay sustainable attention to what we love and divided attention to what we like. We spend hours watching Homeland and give our divided attention to our news feed on Facebook. …
Post a Comment
Read more

Winter and Summer in Adland

It is winter in Adland.  We have moved from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance and algorithms.  We have lost the power of influence. Trust has been severely damaged.  Consumer attention is the new bottleneck. We no longer decide who sees us. Instead, we get picked.  30 second is not enough anymore. We need to take consumers through a scenic journey to create a long lasting relationship.  Everyone is a publisher. It is easier than ever to create, but harder than ever to make a hit.  The impulse to make has far outrun the desire to consume.  New forces have emerged in the form of sophisticated algorithms.  A new model has surfaced called "pay per play,” which scored everything we do on relevance to feeding the machine. It decides what gets picked, when, and where, based on extreme relevancy.  Mass media has vanished. Precision and personalization have emerged.  It is winter in Adland. The good days are all long gone.  It is Summer in Adland We now have the power to make bra…
Post a Comment
Read more