It’s plenty clear that lately, we’ve had other things on our mind, but we’re supposed to be here to prove that Bob Garfield has it bad for Brooke Gladstone.
So, even though I’d rather wear a black armband for “The Bryant Park Project,”it’s time to soldier on, and to find things to tease Bob and Brooke about.
But it’s a hard, hard job I’ve got ahead of me. I’m looking at the list of stories in this episode, and they’re all about how Old Media can’t quite get used to living in the internet age.
Yeah, they’re talking about newspapers, but “On the Media’s” own distribution network just decided to cancel a program who understood the internet in a way nothing else I’ve seen quite seemed to grasp.
I mean, in an interview with Katharine Weymouth, who just took the reins at the Washington Post, Bob actually lets the words “the Web is still in its infancy, nobody has figured out yet how to make any money there, at least any substantial money,” pass his lips.
The Web is not in its infancy, Bob. We are no longer living in 1996, with 1400 Baud modems and a financially solvent AOL.
The main reason big chunks of old media are suffering is because they haven’t figured out how to deal with the fact that people are accustomed to getting for free anything that can be easily reproduced. Thus the music and film and newspaper industries are suffering, while crafts seem to be doing pretty much okay.
It’s been made abundantly clear to me lately, that Bob’s technological myopia is endemic to NPR as a whole. When NPR’s interim CEO, Dennis Haarsarger made a cameo on the “Bryant Park Project’s” blog, he made an ass of himself by blathering on about how
Web/podcasting usage was also hampered — here’s the relearning part — since we were offering an “appointment program” in a medium that doesn’t excel in that kind of usage. Web radio is growing very rapidly (much faster than FM did), but it’s almost all to music and, increasingly, to attention-tracking music (e.g., Pandora).
While he was completely ignoring the fact that the BPP was drawing about a million unique listeners every month, and the fact that most of us listened online or via podcasting, he also resisted the idea of change in terms of fundraising. He didn’t want to try anything new, because, “It’s unclear (that’s the word people use when they don’t know the answer) that this would work.”
Mr. Haarsarger, Mr. Garfield, the Internet has not been the future since online business looked like this:
Now, if you would please, let those of us who know what we’re doing help you out a tiny bit. Listen when we tell you that sometimes, giving things away for free is a brilliant business model. That you don’t need to charge the end user to access the product in order to make money.
That said, we also know that sometimes, free services hemorrhage money.
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