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by Dave Morgan
, Featured Contributor,
December 19, 2024
How do you get your news today? How do you learn what is happening in hotspots like Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Taiwan and the Red Sea? What about issues like the Mexican border or governments in trouble
in South Korea, Germany, Canada, Romania and Georgia? Or curiosities like the reported drone sightings in New Jersey?
When analog technologies dominated media, distribution of that media was
scarce and expensive -- broadcast licenses, printing presses, etc. -- but audience attention was plentiful for those that controlled the distribution, and their business models could support enormous
(and quite profitable) newsgathering and reporting organizations, since reliable news was viewed by audiences as a central element of their media consumption.
As digital technologies have
supplanted their analog forebears, distribution of media has become plentiful and (relatively) cheap -- web publishing, cloud streaming, apps, etc. -- and audience attention has become scarce and hard
to attain at scale for all but a few massively scaled technology platforms. Newsgathering and reporting are not central to those offerings, since the platforms are built with utility services at their
center (search, social connections, shopping, communication, etc.), not news consumption.
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Today, the gathering and reporting of reliable news is at best of tertiary importance to platforms,
while at the same time those platforms have depleted the analog media platforms of the vast majority of their advertising revenue, starving their historical newsgathering role and not replacing them
with comparable capabilities of their own.
Who loses? We all do. What happens in places like the South China Sea, Ukraine or Syria is likely to have enormous consequences on Americans, our
wallets and our national security, depending on how everything plays out.
Without reliable news content to understand world events, we’re not likely to be either aware of, or prepared
for, the consequences of what is happening until it has happened to us back here.
What can you do? First, you can care, and recognize that our access to reliable news has degraded badly and is
under further threat.
Second, those of us involved in advertising can recognize how many of our industry’s practices serve to undermine the gathering and reporting of reliable news:
made-for-advertising content that sucks away advertising; exclusion lists that remove high-value brand ads from news content out of fear of harmful associations; seeking only the “easy
button” in ad buying; pushing the vast majority of ad spend to search and social for simplicity and efficiency, not for effectiveness and long-term value development.
News needs your
ads. Please help. You can make a difference.