Newspapers are "too elitist."
Newspapers should be "INTELLIGENT … not intellectual."
So are the words of Lee Abrams, a former XM Radio satellite executive and now chief innovation officer at the Tribune Company, according to Eric Alterman’s blog.
The problems stretch far beyond the print media needing to be less highbrow, he opines. Alterman finds the lack of decent ideas problematic because some of America’s best people are working toward a solution, but the only ones with any initiative are "off their respective rockers."
And it worries him.
"The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry," he writes, "the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper — the primary information-gathering and knowledge-disseminating instrument of American democracy — is going to have to come from somewhere else."
Alterman suggests a side source of funding coming from universities and colleges, suggesting the institutions charge an additional fee to bring in a subscription to the newspaper of their choice. It gives newspapers an additional cash flow, and puts the publication and its advertisers closer to a key demographic.
The problem, he points out, is younger generation’s unwillingness to even pick up free newspapers.
"They often leave them lying around, even at journalism schools, where they are distributed gratis," he writes.
At least it’s an idea he writes, and it’s better than the alternative of leaving the business in the hands of "clueless media moguls and their chief innovation officers.’"
