John Dinges y la obstinación

La obstinación muchas veces es un defecto y otras tantas, una virtud. El caso de John Dinges, quien en pocas semanas aterrizará en Santiago, corresponde a esta segunda clasificación. El ex corresponsal del Washington Post para América Latina, se ha especializado en temas de derechos humanos, escribió sobre la operación Cóndor y trató de "héroe de la Justicia" al juez Juan Guzmán, mientras en Chile era criticado por su sobreexposición (farandulización) y por la deficiente calificación que le dio la Corte Suprema. El profesor de Columbia aparece como la conciencia sobre el pragmatismo. Cuando queremos olvidar lo que dejamos atrás, su obstinación lo pone nuevamente frente a la historia, arriesgando que se le acuse precisamente de melancólico. En Chile se olvida (y se asume) más rápido de lo que asimila John Dinges. Pero él ha construido un nombre y un trabajo y tienes las espaldas profesionales para mantener las críticas (prolongadas) a la política comunicacional de la Concertación, a El Mercurio y también a La Tercera y al olvido sobre la propiedad del desaparecido diario Clarín. De hecho, este artículo del CJR, vuelve a la carga sobre la actitud de La Moneda con Víctor Pey y aprovecha de medir el balance ideológico de la prensa chilena. Lo hace desde esa obstinación que no se resigna a los nuevos escenarios y que lucha en contra de la misma realidad.

http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_curious_case.php
John Dinges
The irony of Chile’s media is that there was more ideological diversity and journalistic energy in the printed press in the late 1980s, in the waning years of the hard-line dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, than now when he is long gone and proponents of democracy are firmly in control. Two daily newspapers, El Mercurio and La Tercera, dominate. Both are politically right of center. Their virtual monopoly is a legacy of the scorched-earth ideological repression that took place when Pinochet took power in the 1970s, confiscating or closing all media organizations that did not cheer on his military government. Chile’s newspaper market became what one study called a market ”duopoly... accompanied by an ideological monopoly.”

One might think that such an unbalanced press would have been remedied in the sixteen years since Pinochet left power, especially considering that the center-left Concertación, a coalition of moderate Socialists and Christian Democrats, has won all the elections. But one would be wrong.
”In sixteen years of democracy, clearly we have a failure in this area,”said Ricardo Lagos Weber, a government minister and spokesman. ”We have a debit, as they say, a debt. The majority that voted for the Concertación still does not have a print medium with which it can fully identify. But what can the state do about this? That is a delicate question.”

Doing nothing–a hands-off policy–perhaps would be defensible. But fighting tooth and nail against the re-emergence of a paper shut down by Pinochet is harder to understand. Consider the Sisyphean struggle of ninety-two-year-old Victor Pey. Pey wants to relaunch Clarín, the raucous, left-leaning tabloid that was the largest-selling weekday paper in the country until it was confiscated by Pinochet as part of his military takeover in 1973.

Pey had purchased the paper a few months before it was confiscated, and he has been trying for more than ten years to get the current government to pay him financial restitution so that he can put Clarín back on the streets. The new Clarín, he assures me, will be independent of any party and will occupy the place it once had as a mass-circulation newspaper on the side of ordinary Chileans. It will be, as its masthead proclaimed in its heyday, Firme con el pueblo, ”Solidly With the People.”

Judging from Pey’s political associations, however, a new Clarín could also be counted on to be firme with most of the policies of the current government, while providing long-absent critical coverage of Chile’s powerful right-wing parties and business community. In a region in which objectivity is not the rule in journalism, diversity of political views and diversity of ownership in the media take on critical importance for democracy. A reasonable restitution settlement–projected in journalistic circles in Chile to be at least $50 million to $100 million–could ensure that Pey’s Clarín avoids the fate of several other newspaper start-ups in recent years that lacked the financial backing to survive.

El desafío de VQR

Virginia Quarterly Review es una revista que en los últimos años ha ganado parte importante de los premios que entrega National Magazine Awards. Pero su prestigio lo ha conseguido porque apuesta por la excelencia, por llenar los espacios que la prensa tradicional dejó de lado y porque aprovecha las espaldas que le da la Universidad de Virginia. VQR paga US$300 por página a sus colaboradores, los envía a cualquier parte del mundo en donde haya una buena historia, golpea a las petroleras que explotan a la población que vive en el delta del Niger, critica la política de Bush en Afganistán, acude en auxilio (periodístico) de los muerto de Darfur, le dice "liberación" al triunfo norvientamita a comienzo de los 70 y manda a narradores latinoamericanos en busca de historias no tradicionales en su propio continente. Pero no es una revista de las que se podría tachar de políticamente correcta, aunque a veces toca esa frontera. Más que eso, VQR es una pista de lo que debieran buscar las revistas universitarias: independencia, perfil, debate y atrevimiento. A continuación dos artículos sobre VQR.


http://www.slate.com/id/2138219/
http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/nyrm/legere_bob.html
Over the past two days, New York media gossip turned away from its usual concerns—like Graydon Carter's latest hairdo—to consider an improbable question: What is the Virginia Quarterly Review? On March 15, the nominations for the annual National Magazine Awards—the Oscars, if you will, of the magazine world—were announced. To the astonishment of glossy magazine types everywhere, a small journal in Virginia garnered not one nomination, as is sometimes politely handed down to such journals, but six. This made the Virginia Quarterly Review the second-most-nominated magazine, behind the Atlantic, which received eight, and ahead of The New Yorker, Harper's, New York, and National Geographic, all of which received five. It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game.

I first heard about VQR two years ago, from my friend David Baker, a poet and critic, and got a subscription soon after. The issues arrived on my desk, thick and fat and glossier—also more colorful—than I'd expected. Many New Yorkers assume that journals with the words "quarterly" or "review" in the title have the stuffy predictability of a baked potato, and perhaps unsurprisingly VQR's most vocal champions to date have been poets, critics, and novelists who live in the world beyond New York.

So far, it has received only a sliver of the media attention devoted to The Believer or N+1, to name two small magazines to have made an impression recently. (Disclosure: I'm a poetry editor at the Paris Review, so I've left the magazine—which is under new editorship—out of this discussion entirely.) But, in its new incarnation, edited by Ted Genoways, VQR is easily as good a magazine as its hipper peers—a journal that makes a practice of emulating the best on offer in the Atlantic and The New Yorker, while publishing lots of poetry and fiction.

Las revistas y los nuevos nichos

La lectoría de las tres principales revistas en EE.UU. alcanza un promedio de 52 millones de personas anuales. Sin embargo, a pesar que la circulación se ha mantenido las evidencias del desgaste son claras, especialmente cuando se revisan sus ingresos y utilidades. Por lo mismo, Time, Newsweek y US.News están realizando transformaciones importantes para no perder lectores y acercarse a internet, como una manera de concentrarse en nuevos segmentos. En Sudamérica Televisa se mueve con mayor lentitud, acercándose especialmente a contenidos globales acompañados de temas específicos, lo que hasta ahora le ha dado resultados. Su fuerte es identificar nichos y complacerlos sin el nivel de especulación (terror) de las revista de más al norte. Tal como lo indica el último informe de The State of the News Media la tendencia a buscar la segmentación se acentúa y acelera. Desde que los diarios reemplazaron a las revistas en su función de entregar interpretación y nuevas historias los cambios no se han detenido. La "liposucción al exceso de grasa" se está reflejando en despidos, cambios en las planas ejecutivas, nuevos diseñadores y un renovado enfoque para los websities. Pero principalmente, un desafío para cambiar y sobrevivir. El siguiente texto de AJR revisa estas transformaciones y lo nichos que se abren.
Por Rachel Smolkin
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4297
When Edward R. McCarrick, the president and worldwide publisher of Time magazine, says the genesis for his weekly's new direction came when "I went to St. Patrick's and I prayed," he's kidding. Probably.

McCarrick follows this bit of whimsy with a hearty laugh and a more measured explanation for changes at his magazine that have included a shift from a Monday sale date to Friday and a vastly increased emphasis on the Web. "The marketplace never stays static," he says. "It constantly changes. It constantly evolves. And you have to stay contemporary. You have to stay in step with what marketplace demand is all about."

The weekly newsmagazines could use some divine inspiration as they grasp for a foothold in a media landscape increasingly dominated by the Web. Over the last few months, the repositioning has been illustrated most dramatically at Time. In addition to shedding about 50 staffers as part of a larger contraction at parent Time Inc., the magazine has hiked its newsstand price by $1, reduced its guaranteed circulation to advertisers from 4 million to 3.25 million, debuted a new advertiser option for counting readers and unveiled a redesign in its March 26 issue. Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report are adapting as well, if at a less precipitous pace.

As newspapers embrace more analysis, enterprise and lifestyle pieces, long the province of magazines, to distinguish themselves from their fast-paced television and Internet competition, the newsweeklies are betting there is still room in the marketplace for them to tackle such work. They also are experimenting with the appropriate online role for publications that have specialized in long-form (or longer-form) journalism, adopting somewhat different approaches to their Internet identities and to the relationships between Web site and magazine.

Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham, who says his Web site roughly equates to a daily paper and the print edition to a Sunday paper, uses an assembly-line analogy to describe the shifting place of weekly newsmagazines in the media pantheon over the last two decades: "What's happening now is that headlines are delivered by the Web. That has pushed newspapers to become more like the newsmagazines were in '82, and it's pushed the newsmagazines to produce a monthly-quality product on a weekly basis, and it's pushed the monthlies into the place of the great quarterlies, and now the quarterlies have become books."

El periodismo sufre de actualidad

Parece un prejuicio asumir que la concentración de los medios siempre es sinónimo de menor competencia y peor calidad. Pero creo que este axioma no funciona necesariamente con la venta de contenidos periodísticos, porque hay otros factores que se suman a las distorsiones generadas por la baja competencia, tanto en Chile como en muchos otros países. Ciertamente la preparación de los periodistas, la poca discriminación de las audiencias y la discrecionalidad de los avisadores influyen para que la calidad de los contenidos periodísticos no sea el óptimo. Este es uno de los tópicos que recoge este texto publicado por Asociación de Prensa de Madrid y que pone a la actualidad -y su búsqueda continua y sin respiro- como un virus que está destruyendo la calidad de los medios de información. Esta discusión, muy academicista, se ha multiplicado desde que los medios han evolucionado hacia el producto periodístico, pero tiene una lógica fría si se considera que la oferta que entrega la red se acerca cada día más a la perfecta ecuación entre calidad e información. Es decir, la oferta si funciona con la lógica de mercado.

Por Carlos G. Reigosa
http://institucional.apmadrid.es/ACM_Upload/
Si yo dijese que eso que llamamos la actualidad informativa es el duro paredón ante el que cae fusilado cada día el verdadero periodismo, seguro que muchos me descalificarían como autor de un despropósito o un exabrupto de más que dudoso gusto, ni siquiera salvable por la vía metafórico-simbólica. En cambio, si me limito a decir que la actualidad se ha convertido en una tupida malla que nos impide ver a los periodistas y a todos los ciudadanos la realidad sobre la que se debería informar, quizá todo suene menos belicoso y más políticamente correcto, sin provocar innecesarios rechazos de partida. Y, por supuesto, creo que nadie considerará excesiva a estas alturas la aseveración que no es mía sino del académico Francisco Rodríguez Adrados de que vivimos en un ambiente presentista, en el que se desprecia el ayer el conocimiento de nuestra propia historia y sólo tiene valor el presente. (Como el propio Rodríguez Adrados escribió, “muchos ya no saben diferenciar a Alejandro Magno de Carlomagno, no saben qué es la Revolución Francesa, ni siquiera saben quién es Franco”). Intentaremos movernos con templanza entre las afirmaciones más comúnmente aceptadas para avanzar en estas reflexiones. Y veremos hasta dónde nos llevan.

Lo cierto lo iremos viendo en este texto es que la actualidad informativa ya no nos deja ver lo que ocurre. Ni nos lo deja ver ni nos lo permite contar. Porque la actualidad, concebida como el resultado diario de múltiples estrategias de comunicación urdidas en el seno de la sociedad, crece en progresión geométrica, y a la misma velocidad se aleja de lo real (a veces sólo por la vía del enmascaramiento o el disfraz). La misión de sus programadores es hacernos creer que el señuelo es la verdad y que detrás de él no se oculta nada. De este modo, la actualidad señuelo nos ciega a satisfacción, es decir, nos impide ver y, lo que es peor, investigar y entender. El resultado es demoledor: los periodistas ya no controlan la agenda cotidiana, ni eligen los contenidos, ni jerarquizan la información. A esto se enfrenta el periodismo de hoy. Este es su gran desafío. Y de momento no va ganando la partida.

Un periodista sale por la mañana de su casa y se enfrenta a un colosal listado de previsiones y convocatorias informativas que, de un modo defensivo surgido sin duda de su propia indefensión, acepta e identifica como la actualidad. Eso que tiene delante es lo mucho que hay informativamente hablando ese día. Sin embargo, todos sabemos y ese periodista también lo sabe que está ante una desmesurada oferta de información precocinada por gabinetes de prensa y direcciones de comunicación cuyo objetivo es la conquista de los espacios mediáticos destinados a la actualidad. Y para conseguir ocupar esos territorios periodísticos tienen que acertar antes a crear la información (y también el hecho informativo) que se va a convertir en actualidad, es decir, que va obtener unos puestos relevantes en los medios. Es lo que primero vemos cada mañana es la previsiones del día como surgido por generación espontánea de la realidad social, sin que reflexionemos en que ha sido meticulosamente premeditado y organizado por alguien. Pero lo ha sido Esa actualidad ha sido preparada ante en el laboratorio de comunicación pertinente, en el que se ha estudiado la mejor forma de presentarla, el día más conveniente, las otras actualidades con las que va a competir, etc. Si dejamos a un lado las páginas de sucesos, nos asombraría comprobar el altísimo porcentaje de informaciones que son hijas de esa laboriosa espontaneidad.

Personalmente, me causa asombro el inmenso y quizá desvergonzado esfuerzo teorizador que catedráticos y expertos mediáticos están haciendo para identificar periodismo y actualidad, sin entrar en la evolución que cada uno de estos conceptos ha sufrido en el pasado reciente y está sufriendo ahora. Sólo unos pocos lúcidos pensadores parecen habar caído en la cuenta del abismo que se está abriendo justamente debajo de esa unidad o fusión aparentes. Me refiero a Jean Bothorel, a Furio Colombo, a Pilles Lipovetsky, a Alain Minc, a Jean Baudrillard, a Alvin Toffler y a algunos más. Porque la realidad es que, a medida que la actualidad invade desconsiderada y abusivamente los medios de comunicación, el periodismo se debilita y retrocede, sumido en el desconcierto y dañado; ese mismo oficio que, según definiciones de antaño, tenía las responsabilidades sociales de informar, formar y entretener, y que ahora ve claramente condicionadas y menoscabas sus posibilidades de ejercer esas funciones.

La situación es tan dramática a pesar de la conjura para no ver el drama que, hace ya 15 años, el brillante periodista francés Jean Bothorel se preguntó en un apasionante ensayo publicado en la Reveu des deux mondes: “¿Puede hoy, en Francia, un periodista ejercer su oficio?”. Y no tuvo el menor reparo en responder: “No”. Y añadía: “Yo tengo el sentimiento de que el periodista ya no existe. Y en cuanto a la opinión pública, es demasiado poco conscient3e de la extraordinaria degradación que afecta a este oficio, y de las razones de esta desgradación”. ¿Por qué lo decía? Porque empezaba a ser conciente, desde una lucidez precoz, de la enorme transubstanciación que se estaba produciendo en el periodismo francés y occidental y que afectaba directa y perniciosamente a su propio oficio. E insistía en lo de oficio, porque lo que estaba viendo era que la nueva denominación de profesional de los media ocultaba un significado distinto, por no decir como él dice casi opuesto, ubicado en la antípodas.

El influyente Mossberg

Walter Mossberg es uno de los columnitas más influyente en EE.UU. actualmente. Quizás más que Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman o William Safire. Su página en el Wall Street Journal puede hacer tambalear a empresas como Microsoft, Apple o Intel. Tal como Greenspan hacía tambalear las acciones más transadas en en Wall Street, Mossberg moviliza (al alza o la baja) los títulos de las empresas tecnológicas. Los nuevos medios han creado nuevos tipos de productos y nuevo tipo de periodistas. Y, por supuesto, nuevo tipo de columnistas. Más técnicos, sin duda; más al servicio del lector que de sus propios puntos de vista. Columnistas que reportean, que se informan, que conocen las necesidades de los lectores y que, por supuesto, saben cómo satisfacerlas. Los medios deben tener el coraje de tener un columnista como Mossberg, que frente a la disyuntiva de dañar los ingresos por publicidad de su medio o democratizar la información, siempre optará por esta segunda opción.


Por Ken Auletta
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/14/
On a blustery, overcast day early this year, P.R. representatives from Sprint and Samsung stopped by the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal to meet with the columnist Walter S. Mossberg. The agenda was clear: Sprint had a new music phone designed by Samsung, and the group was hoping for a positive reception from a man who has become to technology what Brooks Atkinson once was to the New York theatre—someone whose judgment can ratify years of effort or sink the show. Mossberg’s “Personal Technology” column, which anchors the front of the Journal’s Thursday Marketplace section, is particularly powerful when it comes to judging innovation intended for the consumer market. The opening sentence of his inaugural column, sixteen years ago, was “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault,” a sentence that Mossberg has since described as his “mission statement.”

Mossberg’s influence was felt almost at once. In 1992, he began championing the Internet service provider America Online for its simplicity, calling it far superior to its competitors, CompuServe and Prodigy; his persistent criticism of Prodigy probably hastened its demise. (Steve Case, AOL’s former chairman and C.E.O., says that Mossberg’s column “helped move us from the status of just another wannabe to a potential contender.”) In 1996, after Mossberg called the handheld Palm Pilot a “breakthrough product”—a comment that Donna Dubinsky, the company’s former C.E.O., calls “a huge thing”—its sales surged. In February, Mossberg praised the site blip.tv for the quality of its Web-based TV shows; according to Dina Kaplan, the company’s co-founder, the Web site had a thirty-five-per-cent jump in viewers in the first twenty-four hours after the column appeared.

Reviews of digital products and advances have become commonplace. The magazine PC, among others, has reviewed products since the eighties, and Wired covers technology with the avidity that the Washington Post brings to politics. David Pogue has been the Times’ technology critic since 2000; Newsweek, Business Week, and Fortune all have regular technology critics. But the digital world inevitably democratizes information. A Web site, for instance, may be devoted to a single product. On January 9th, when, at the annual MacWorld conference, Steve Jobs, the C.E.O. of Apple, offered the first glimpse of Apple’s forthcoming iPhone, a combination cell phone and music player, the blog Engadget.com had more traffic than the Times’ Web site.

Few tech columnists, though, write as clearly about the subject as Mossberg. Nor is it likely that any print journalist in America is so richly compensated by his newspaper. Some journalists, such as Thomas L. Friedman, of the Times, earn more if one factors in speeches and books, but when, recently, Mossberg signed a four-year contract, two Journal sources told me, his annual compensation approached a million dollars. Mossberg refuses to discuss his pay; a friend with knowledge of the negotiations says that “pay has always been an issue at the Journal,” and that Mossberg doesn’t want to be viewed as a “prima donna.”

A week after Eric Schmidt became the C.E.O. of Google, six years ago, he went to see Mossberg. “He had just written an article about Google,” Schmidt says. “I wanted to get his insights. He was very gracious in saying, ‘This is what works. This is what doesn’t.’ He’s seen everything.” Schmidt says of him, as one might of a wine writer, “He has a good nose.”

Del plagio y su multiplicación

Cuesta creer que la revista Cosas aún no haya dado la cara por el vergonzoso (principalmente por el tema) plagio que hizo de la revista neoyorquina Radar, ni que su corresponsal haya dado señales de arrepentimiento. Este artículo de Slate reseña como se han masificado las acusaciones de plagio, entre ellas las que está enfrentando el escritor peruano Alfredo Bryce Ecehnique e intenta llegar al porqué de esta "caza de brujas" moderna. Incluso se justifica el fenómeno -especialmente en la literatura- por el culto que hoy existe a la originalidad. En el periodismo, el fuerte ingreso de internet como medio de información también ha multiplicado las alertas sobre esta situación, del que es imposible sentirse seguro. Michael Kelly, uno de los grandes editores estadounidenses, cargó toda su vida, hasta su muerte en Irak en 2003, con más de 30 artículos inventados (o plagiados) por un periodista suyo mientras fue editor del New Republic. Evidentemente el tema no está en la los riesgos, sino en la capacidad de responder a la falta de controles, al exceso de energía de algunos periodistas y al poca pericia de los editores. Y finalmente a la decente decisión de pedir disculpas.

Por Meghan O'Rourke
http://www.slate.com/id/2157435
We may know pornography when we see it, but the same can't be said of plagiarism. Ever since it was revealed last month that several passages in Ian McEwan's Atonement closely resemble sections of Lucilla Andrews' World War II memoir, No Time For Romance, critics have debated whether the similarities constitute wholesale "plagiarism" or mere literary "discourtesy." The one thing everyone does agree on, apparently, is the necessity of policing plagiarism, whatever it may be. A partial list of authors recently accused (rightly or wrongly) includes Dan Brown, Yann Martel, Kaavya Viswanathan, J.K. Rowling, playwright Bryony Lavery, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, and Alan Dershowitz. In an op-ed in early 2003, Condoleezza Rice even cited Saddam Hussein's habitual plagiarism as evidence of the leader's fundamental treachery.

Our distaste for plagiarism is usually framed in terms of our affection for originality. "We prize originality above everything and place a high value on novelty of expression," Robert McCrum wrote in the Observer, examining the outcry over McEwan. In The Little Book of Plagiarism, an engaging new study of the concept, law professor and Judge Richard A. Posner attributes today's "increasing attention" to plagiarism largely to a "cult of originality" first shaped by the Romantics—who venerated individual genius—and further intensified by a 21st-century modern market economy that values novelty in its "expressive works." Obviously, originality does have something to do with all the fuss: Most of us expect writers—especially novelists and poets—to have a distinctive voice and literary style.

We carve out exceptions for writers like Shakespeare—a plagiarist by modern-day standards—because they are creative in their use of borrowed material; such copying isn't "slavish" but inventive, or, as Posner puts it, "The imitation is producing value." Those who don't recontextualize borrowed work—like Kaavya Viswanathan—we censure.

Murdoch sale de compras

La noticia que el Rupert Murdoch había lanzado una OPA hostil sobre Dow Jones golpeó fuerte a la industria de los medios en EE.UU.

Los casi US$5 mil millones que ofrece por la firma, no sólo le darían el control sobre el Wall Street Journal, sino también un elemento más al considerable poder que ya maneja News Corp. El dueño de la cadena Fox y de decenas de periódicos en Europa, Oceanía y EE.UU., es visto como un villano por algunos de sus biógrafos y por periodistas como Robert Fisk. El corresponsal del The Independent no pierde oportunidad para destacar como Murdoch despojó de toda independencia al Time sólo con el mismo fin ideológico que persigue con la cadena Fox. Es un hecho que Murdoch es el paradigma de los medios convertidos en industria, competencia y pragmatismo. En su trayectoria este último es el calificativo que más le calza: rechazó las nuevas tecnologías y luego compró MySpace.com, fue un abierto partidario de la política internacional (Irak incluido) de Bush y hoy cree en el retiro de las tropas del Golfo Pérsico. Este texto es quizás el mejor perfil que se ha hecho de Murdoch. Fue publicado el 2003, pero es el mismo Murdoch de ahora.

Por James Fallows

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200309/fallows

No civics text has the stomach to describe Washington's "wait in line" industry. When a famous witness is to appear before a committee of Congress, or a famous case is to be argued at the Supreme Court, tourists imagine they can drop in to watch; but they discover that the line for admission formed well before dawn. Professionals in town—lawyers, lobbyists—can't afford to be left out, especially if clients' money is at stake. So they hire services to do the waiting for them. On the days of big events, lines resembling those outside soup kitchens or for-pay blood banks snake through marble corridors in House and Senate office buildings and spill out onto the sidewalk long before most staffers show up for work. At 9:45 or so, for the typical 10:00 A.M. committee hearing, taxis and town cars begin depositing passengers who have come from breakfast or early meetings at their firms.

The paid placeholders hold up little signs with names on them, like limo drivers greeting arrivals at an airport, and the switch occurs. Someone with wild hair or wearing several sweatshirts leaves his place in line or his seat in the hearing room, and someone in a nice suit steps in. Economically the arrangement makes sense, but it's a little too crass a reminder of the different standing of citizens before their democratic government.

A line formed outside the Russell Senate Office Building early one morning this May, in anticipation of a session that would combine glamour and money. Congress was beginning to pay attention to pending changes in the rules that restrict the number of radio and TV stations a person or company may own. The proposed revisions were highly technical, but if the changes went through, they would provoke a wave of buying, selling, and consolidation in the media business. In particular they would allow, and therefore presumably encourage, a large number of mergers or takeovers among newspapers and TV stations. Supporters argued that this would be economically efficient and productive, opponents that it would give too much power to too few companies. A Senate committee chaired by John McCain had summoned several expert witnesses to discuss the implications of the changes that morning, along with a man who was not directly involved in the debate but who seemed to personify media power: Rupert Murdoch.

At this hearing, as in most of his public appearances, Murdoch would dismiss the idea that he is anything like a media "baron" or that the holdings of his company, News Corporation, constitute an "empire"—a term he dislikes. The company is generally referred to as "News" or "News Corp"; politicians often pronounce the name "News Core," as if it were akin to the Peace Corps or the Marine Corps. Its main holdings are the Fox broadcast networks and Fox News, Fox Sports, FX, and other Fox cable channels in the United States; 20th Century Fox studios; thirty-five local U.S. TV stations; the New York Post plus The Times and The Sun of London; the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard; the publishing house HarperCollins; the Sky satellite system in England and the Star satellite system in Asia; the Los Angeles Dodgers, which News Corp is selling; and various publications in Murdoch's native Australia. In addition, Murdoch is now seeking federal approval to buy a one-third share in DirecTV, the leading satellite-broadcast system in North America.

To someone not named Murdoch, this might sound like a lot. But Rupert Murdoch frequently points out that the three established TV networks in the United States are part of conglomerates much larger than his. Last year the total revenues of News Corp were about $17 billion. CBS belongs to Viacom, which also owns Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster, Blockbuster, Infinity radio, and so on, with total revenues of $25 billion. ABC is part of Disney, with revenues of $26 billion. NBC is owned by General Electric, whose total revenues were $131 billion. Murdoch's upstart Fox News Channel, founded in 1996, has for more than a year consistently beaten the better-known CNN (founded in 1980) in cable-news rankings. CNN is part of the AOL Time Warner combine, whose revenues last year, despite the historic AOL collapse, were $42 billion—two and a half times News Corp's.

Los dos mundos de los diarios

Es curioso como en Chile la discusión sobre temas de medios muchas veces no trasciende la ideológica mirada del "monstruo del duopolio", especialmente en momentos que los cuestionamientos, las miradas y los análisis apuntan a temas más profundos que la dudosa concentración de los contenidos. Más un tema de las audiencias que de la ideología. El futuro de los diarios -y de los medios en general- está cubierto de aristas que hacen de esta discusión una prioridad. Especialmente en momentos en que muchos plantean que la supervivencia de los diarios está en convertirse en híbridos, es decir mitad papel, mitad internet. Como lo ha hecho Perfil en Argentina. Pero la discusión va más allá. Cómo mantener los mismo niveles de calidad, como enfrentar la libertad y democracia que plantea internet a muchos de los contenidos que hoy no aparecen en los medios tradicionales por la presión de los avisadores, cómo convencer a las agencias de publicidad que los puntos de venta no necesariamente son la panacea y cómo mantener cautivos a los antiguos lectores. Hay otras dudas, el número de minutos (bajo) que se le dedican a los diarios online y el costo de esta aventura. Producir en la red es un 50% más barato que hacerlo en papel. Finalmente, el mejor argumento para la supervivencia. Este artículo de CJR recoge esta discusión que pronto será más importante que la "crueldad del duopolio".

Por Robert Kuttner
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Kuttner.asp
By the usual indicators, daily newspapers are in a deepening downward spiral. The new year brought reports of more newsroom layoffs, dwindling print circulation, flat or decliningad sales, increasing defections of readers and advertisers to the Internet, and sullen investors. Wall Street so undervalues traditional publishing that McClatchy’s stock price briefly rose when it sold off the Minneapolis Star Tribune at a fire-sale price, mainly for the $160 million tax benefit. As succeeding generations grow up with the Web and lose the habit of reading print, it seems improbable that newspapers can survive with a cost structure at least 50 percent higher than their nimbler and cheaper Internet competitors. (“No trucks, no trees,” says the former Boston Globe publisher Ben Taylor.) The dire future predicted by the now-classic video, EPIC 2014, in which Google, Amazon, and an army of amateurs eventually drive out even The New York Times, begins to feel like a real risk.

Yet a far more hopeful picture is emerging. In this scenario the mainstream press, though late to the party, figures out how to make serious money from the Internet, uses the Web to enrich traditional journalistic forms, and retains its professionalism—along with a readership that is part print, part Web. Newspapers stay alive as hybrids. The culture and civic mission of daily print journalism endure.

Can that happen? Given the financial squeeze and the shortsightedness of many publishers and investors, will dailies be able to navigate such a transition without sacrificing standards of journalism? Or will cost-cutting owners so thoroughly gut the nation’s newsrooms that they collapse the distinction between the rest of the Internet and everything that makes newspapers uniquely valuable?

Which newspapers are most likely to survive? And, while we are at it, why does the survival of newspapers matter? In an era when the Web explodes the monopoly of the print newspaper as authoritative assembler of the day’s news and invites readers to be both aggregators and originators of content, what remains distinctive about newspapers?

Defenders of print insist that nothing on the Web can match the assemblage of reportorial talent, professionalism, and public mission of a serious print daily. The 2006 State of the News Media Report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that just 5 percent of blog postings included “what would be considered journalistic reporting.” Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, wrote a skeptical piece about Web journalism in The New Yorker last July, concluding that not much of the blogosphere “yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.” John Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, says, “Take any story in a blog and trace its origins, about eighty-five percent of it can be traceable to newspapers. They break nearly all of the important stories. Who’s going to do the reporting if these institutions fade away?”

By contrast, celebrants of the Web contend that the Internet is freer, more democratic, deliberative, interactive, and civic than the self-interested elites of old media dare admit. “The priesthood of gatekeepers is being disbanded. It’s over,” says Christopher Lydon, a one-time New York Times reporter, now hosting Open Source on Public Radio International.

In exploring whether newspapers as we know them are likely to endure, and why we should care, I sought out Wall Street analysts, press critics, journalism professors, business consultants, publishers, editors, reporters, and the search-engine companies and multifarious originators of Web content that are challenging newspapers. The Internet has famously turned the authority structure upside down; so perhaps not surprisingly, one of my most informative interviews was with a colleague, a twenty-two-year-old prodigy we can call Ezra. Before we defenders of newspapers become too smug about what makes us special, he’s worth listening to.

I opened the conversation by inviting us to compare how we get our daily ration of information. I begin my day, I immodestly confessed, by reading four newspapers. What do you do?