Re: What is the state of American media today?

Description: The digital revolution, Meacham says, has been liberating for print.

Transcript: There is a proliferation of outlets, obviously. This is all painfully cliché. Everyone is a pundit. Everyone has become a publisher. Everyone’s become their own editor. And if you believe in democracy and you believe in the first amendment you have to applaud that. The First Amendment’s not just for people who pay other people to gather news. I do think that there is a function for editors. There’s a functions for reporters who are committed to a craft in which they do the best they can at taking information in as clinical a way as possible. Not necessarily a neutral . . . you know we all have our biases, we all have our prejudices. We all bring whatever we bring to the process; but we do make the best effort possible at presenting information in a clinical way, and then people can do with it what they want. And that model is under great economic stress. I don’t think it’s under great audience stress. I think people are adding to what they do, not subtracting, if that makes sense. And so how we convince advertisers, frankly, and people to pay subscription rates for the news we gather is the great challenge of the next 10 years. And the moment we figure it out, 20 minutes later it will change again. But I’m fairly bullish about it because I think that the story will out. It’s always about good stories. It’s always about, as Horace once said, “both delighting and instructing”. And that’s been true for a long, long time. And the advent of prose didn’t kill poetry, and so I think we’ll be all right.

Online we move faster. It actually has been liberating in print because we’re able to assume that people know just about everything that happened by the time they come to us. So it enables us to step back even farther to some extent and really tell a story in as . . . in as inventive a way as possible. And so it’s increased the amount of overall product we put out there, but it’s changed the weekly product in ways I think are actually good for it.

Question: Are conglomerates a threat?

Leaving aside Mr. Murdoch, I think that actually flies in the face of what’s happening. You can’t have a proliferating media universe where everyone can have their own publication, and then worry too much about concentrated power. Is it a threat? Certainly. Everything’s a threat; but my sense – and I work for, I guess, a media conglomerate – I’ve never had a conversation with our owners about we should do this or not do that. I think that most conspiracy theories are wrong for a reason. And I stay up at night about how do we bring in a new generation of people who would be interested in the kind of analysis and news we offer as opposed to worrying about the top down. I’m more worried about the bottom up right now.

Recorded on: 7/3/07