An ongoing special report
and adjunct to the NUblog Weblog on online content
Previous
(Back to MogulWatch) – Next
2000.08.15
As you'll know from following MogulWatch, the mogul steering the Quebecor freight train straight into a wall, Pierre Karl Péladeau, finds himself in the grips of a mad lust for a cable company, Vidéotron. Yet Quebecor is a printing company with newspaper holdings, plus a few Web sites and a neglected TV network here and there.
Meanwhile, CanWest, a TV network, buys a newspaper chain in the name of convergence.
Just what makes anyone think this is gonna work?
Nontransferability
We have a hard time putting up with the hubris of nabobs who decide that their knowledge of some ostensibly related field qualifies them for a certain other kind of work. If you've worked in PR, you see yourself as a journalist. If you have a degree in film studies, voilà: You're a producer.
It's all communications, right? It's all "the media," right?
Wrong.
Let's start with Quebecor. By paying a shocking $4.9 billion for Vidéotron, Péladeau would own a dominant cable company and a dominant, if schlocky, Quebec television network, TVA (now seen across Canada; that's how we know it's schlocky). As Janet McFarland noted in Globe and Mail:
Quebecor doesn't know much about running a cable company, for starters, and no one knows much about whether cable access for Internet TV is going to be the revolution that's promised. [...] The [AOL/Time] outcome is becoming less clear, especially if offering unlimited access to everything would undo the point of the whole convergence exercise, which is supposed to steer people toward your own offerings. [...] Quebecor is no Time Warner, but it wants to build a Quebec equivalent of this dominance. [...] But even with possible dominance of the French-language Internet world, analysts aren't convinced there is big money to be made from the combination, not to mention the possibility that customers will head elsewhere online and not watch TVA after all....
Many companies, such as CanWest Global, have decided to focus on content [sic].... Others are gambling on the whole package, linking cable with content at an early stage, believing it will become the clear winner down the road. Quebecor is betting on this option, but hasn't presented a convincing argument to investors that the synergies will work and the convergence will make money one day. And it especially hasn't made a convincing argument that it is the right company with the skills to do it.
Testify, sister.
Now let's consider Global, helmed by Izzy Asper. What little original content is produced for its TV networks is low-grade news or a CanCon series, produced if and only if the richly profitable CanWest Global can secure public funding.
The Internet is all about originality. The bandwidth isn't there yet to accommodate television signals, and even if we do get that bandwidth, people are not going to want to watch Survivor over GlobalTV.com. (And that's just what Global will push your way: An imported American program.)
In both cases, delusional moguls errantly assume the existence of some kind of transferable skills and knowledge. Quebecor knows nothing about pipelines (viz. cable television) and not a whole lot about TV in general. CanWest knows nothing about newspapers and next to nothing about the Internet; its TV networks are low-quality. At the same time, Péladeau is busy hacking away at credible Web properties, having shut down two newspaper Web sites and launched public broadsides against his own flagship portal, Canoe.
These scenarios end up being lose-lose: The conglomerates funnel billions in sale costs down the tubes (here we read "spend" as "lose"); shareholders are taken to the cleaners; quality does not improve, and diversity of opinion certainly does not.
Quality is job none
How can we say that quality won't improve? Think of deadlines. Substantive errors are uncommon in the print medium and are rather low-profile. Online, there's enormous pressure to get a story out right now – more pressure even than in live television, where everyone from news producers to anchors can get carried away. That's what a lack of deadline will do to you. We don't have to mention the outrageous speculation routinely heard during dead moments of "ongoing" live news coverage on, say, CNN. Information does not want to be free, but airtime wants to be filled, even if lacking factual basis.
Without enough vetting, without enough sober second thought, without enough pairs of experienced eyes and ears stopping to think, you make mistakes. In some extreme, admittedly rare, but titanically conspicuous cases, you destroy lives: Just ask what television's overexuberance did to Richard Jewell.
These errors may be as rare as in the print medium, but they are far higher in profile, and everyone knows that television newscasts crib from each other promiscuously, spreading incorrect memes as fast as a newsreader can enunciate them.
Now imagine an electronic media conglomerate with mainly a television background. If TV is fast, the net can be even faster. As we know from downloadable music, the technical capacity to do something is sufficient justification online. If it's technically possible to run a story without sufficient vetting, that will become the norm.
Just how many mistakes will, for example, Global's new "synergistic" journalistic "properties" make in the run of a year?
People and skills
We know a new-media producer at a TV network who maintains that a small percentage of television types can, with reëducation, do good work in new media.
We agree. But that means most TV types are hopeless online. It's very well-known already that typical print journos are unsuited to online work:
- Online Journalism Review: "By each day's 11 a.m. news meeting, [a Web journo] recalls, she had read the Mercury News thoroughly. But, almost without fail, none of the newspaper editors present had looked at the Web site. The result: 'They'd be talking about a story for the next day's paper that had already gone through two or three iterations on the Web.' "
- OJR again: "In traditional newsrooms, staff members rarely think about a story's online dimension, says Bernard Gwertzman, editor of The New York Times on the Web. 'Print journalists as a rule don't really look at the Web much. And their editors are even less likely to do so.' "
The right thing to do is to set up a separate online news operation with staff trained and experienced in the net. That doesn't always mean twentysomethings; it does, however, mean hiring afresh. And what's the first thing a conglomerate does after it merges or acquires? Fires staff. Heck, Péladeau already plans to do just that with an existing "property," Canoe, even before blowing billions on Vidéotron.
So the existing staff won't cut it online and skinflints like Péladeau and Asper are rather unlikely to hire expensive new cadres. What happens to quality? It sure ain't gonna improve.
Big brands are worthless
And besides, your brand name in old media means nothing in new media, as the American TV networks have learned the hard way. Disney, ABC, NBC – you name the monolith, it's tanking online. The nominal exception is MSNBC, where about a third of its hits derive from MSN.
The real exceptions to the rule are public broadcasters that devote large staffs to online-specific newsgathering. You know who we're talking about: BBC. CBC Newsworld. Good content costs. But media barons of the Péladeau–Asper axis aren't willing to put up the money, full stop.
Quite simply, quasi-horizontal integration of this sort is bad business that leads to bad journalism. Now, how will any of that keep people from surfing Yahoo and eBay rather than your megasite?
← Previous: Pierre-Karl Péladeau,
digging his own grave
→ Next: Cutting off noses
Back to the NUblog
contenu.nu home | Contact (quickie E-mail)
| 