MMMM # 377 --- RealTime News

"...the sheer proliferation and aggressiveness of the media that have ratcheted up the intensity of political life. Almost every facet of politics is more complicated and hard-edged. Voters want instant results. 

                                                                                  A retired member of Congress


     At some point along the way to the digital media future, we may have sped past one group of people with a dog in the fight: the consumers of the news we disseminate.
     How many news consumers really have time time to follow the stream of tweets and facebook posts and tumblr or other online updates on stories? Multi-tasking is one thing, multi-gorging on news tidbits is another.
     Former Congressman Lee Hamilton, quoted above, is a director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University and was in congress for 34 years. He concludes in his column blames technology for hobbling the way politics works, making it almost impossible to actually solve problems.
     If consumers are in fact spending their day consulting their electronic oracles every few seconds to learn the latest minutia as stories develop, when are they doing their jobs? Or is the audience now composed mostly of the retired and unemployed?
    So old-fashioned!

Believe me I know how old fogy this sounds, but isn't there some value, on most days, to letting the media do its job of figuring out the who what when where and why of a story, and then reporting the story that evening. Sigh. How pathetic, Lennox!
     I have the luxury of following news as it happens for most of the hours of the day, and of course I both consume and contribute to the tidal-wave of digital content. For a news junkie like myself, it's a perfect job. But the proliferation of media streams and sources Lee Hamilton mentions is relentless and growing and insistent. And he believes it is contributing to the inability of political rivals to do what they are supposed to do: "...it is much harder to do the basic work of politics: finding common ground."
     That's all for now, I've got to go tweet-post-instagram-tumblr this MMMM.

[PLUS: USA Today reported on a new wrinkle in the newspaper battle of New Orleans...a small nearby paper rushing in to fill the void created by the cutback by the traditional big city paper. A similar, if less ambitious effort, is underway in Birmingham, where The Tuscaloosa News has started distributing more aggressively in Birmingham to take advantage of the three-day-a week schedule of The Birmingham News.]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is regular feature of www.TimLennox.com.]


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