Media and Mayhem

It’s a habit I have.

Whenever the media pile on an individual, I never assume that the target is taking the heat for the publicized reason. More often, some deeper collective anxiety is lying there right below the surface, festering because we find it easier to blame an individual than to face a more fundamental truth. Celebrities and personalities are convenient targets and riveting news hooks, but they are rarely the whole story.

Last week Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News had their lowest ratings since she joined the broadcast. Now we’ll hear the inevitable agonizing about why the ratings were low and why she failed to attract a younger audience.

So here’s my 2 cents.

I think it is flat out crazy to blame Katie Couric for failing to accomplish something that was pretty ridiculous in the first place. CBS, like each of the other major networks, have long agonized about why their signature evening newscasts have attracted such aging audiences. Who wouldn’t get tired of selling ads for laxatives and the purple pill, whatever that is? And occasionally each of the networks have managed to lower the average age of their audience by a year or two. But this was never enough for those newscasts to become significant profit centers.

And then CBS news decided that Katie Couric could revive and rejuvenate their broadcast. When neither the audience nor the youth showed up, the piling on began.

I simply want to suggest something that others like Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine have been saying for a long time: This is no longer about youth or demographics or audience size of the evening news. Incremental changes in the size and age of the evening news audience will not render the evening newscasts either profitable or relevant.

People are finding their news in different places and new technologies are evolving at breakneck speed. But most importantly, the old model that focused the entire news gathering process on a daily prestige broadcast no longer makes any sense. As one of “Cronkite’s Kids” I share some of the nostalgia for this daily national gathering, but nostalgia will simply not render it relevant.

Young people are consuming news, and they have not completely abandoned traditional sources, but they are now also finding it in blogs, streaming video and audio, television network websites, cell phones, and social networking sites. In the last few days, MSNBC signed a deal in which they will provide news content to – are you ready? – MySpace.

News is alive and well. There simply are too many thriving and competing producers of news content to keep the old nightly news franchise afloat. One talented journalist will never reverse a tidal wave of social and technological change.

Katie Couric didn’t fail. The suits did.