More Trouble For Traditional Media
It’s just a small thing, but i is illuminating.
This morning, on my return to Los Angeles, the LA Times ran a TV spot touting a 125th Anniversary edition. And what were they selling? 125 years of images of great moments in sports.
What’s wrong with this?
While I am sure the LAT package will be excellent, these are the kinds of events that used to be unique to Traditional Media. How else could the average person get access to decades and decades of cool images and memories?
But now, this kind of thing is endlessly available via the web. Moreover, there is the sense that the LAT is, in this ad, attaching themselves to these events as though the insititution naturally has something to do with them. What the LAT does own… what they are empowered by… are the words of their writers who analyzed those moments.
The notion that Traditional Media still owns the news is over. The new model is choice. Too much choice perhaps. But choice. And that choice is driven, as ever, by the offer of materials better or different than the rest of what has become everybody’s bottomless slush pile.
I get that you’re saying we now have flickr and google images, etc. But is there not some kind of premium they can put on professional photographers, the kind that have a certain amount of craft involved with capturing the moment or perspective. Is that not valid in the same way that someone writing literary commentary is?
I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that very few of the images in the 125 years of LA Times sports photography is exclusive or unique to the LAT… and that now that material is accessible in many other ways.
So the distinction you’re making is between sports photography versus, say, war photography or protraiture?
This isn’t the only instance of LAT exaggeration. Their theatrical spots boast that they’ve been covering the local movie scene for “over a century.” The first films to be shot in L.A. were around 1907 or 1908–just under 100 years ago.