JPR listeners probably know Bob Garfield best as co-host of NPR’s On the Media (heard Saturdays at 11 AM on our News and Information Service). However, Garfield has recently been on the lecture circuit promoting his new book, The Chaos Scenario, which describes the collapse of the old order of mass media and explores the media world which will ensue. It is a fascinating, and entertaining, read for everyone who doesn’t hold stock in any existing mass media company.

With newspapers and magazines rapidly in decline, Garfield offers a sobering picture of the media landscape. Briefly summarized, he explains that audience levels for print and broadcast media are in a state of irreversible decline. Since virtually all media enterprises are advertising-supported, he charts the
decline of their advertising revenue since advertisers pay based upon a cost-per-thousand (readers, listeners or viewers). It is a system, he explains, which has functioned according to the basic economic laws of supply and demand. During a time when there were few media sources (one or two newspapers, a handful of television stations and a dozen or two radios stations) the American public segmented among them and advertisers who wanted to reach them had a limited number of choices.

The Digital Age has atomized that equation. Readership and broadcast station audience levels are consistently falling. They are now defining “success” as stabilizing at those reduced levels – and doing well if they achieve it. In contrast, the Googles, Twitters and YouTubes of the world, are posting explosive audience gains. As a result of the digital revolution, the “supply” of media sources has skyrocketed and the demand for most traditional media is, therefore, falling. He notes that two of the major TV broadcast networks have already publicly discussed the possibility that they might abandon their terrestrial network of local TV stations and become nothing more than cable channels – and thinks such changes are likely. Curiously, Garfield asserts that the print and broadcast media brought this all on themselves by launching into the digital world without any clear idea of a business plan or how that world might function. Watching from the “inside,” I have to observe that National Public Radio (NPR) seems to have also done just that.
Unless you work, or have ownership, in traditional media, why care? These are, after all, just dissemination devices for content. If the content is available online, life continues fine, right? Well, that’s where things start to get really depressing. (Garfield’s book, by the way, is written quite humorously so that, even as I was reading about the death of most of what has been the media world, I found myself regularly laughing out loud.)

Garfield argues that most Internet content consists either of personally uploaded trivia or stolen use of professionally produced content largely purloined from traditional media and backs the thesis up with Internet usage figures. Basically, he contends, few media outlets have found it worthwhile to litigate stolen use of their content, although that seems to be gradually changing. He asserts that, as traditional media continually downgrade their content investments (like replacing expensive TV network dramas with inexpensive reality or talk programs) in the face of declining audience and advertising revenue, there will be less to steal and online will devolve into more amateur content largely because advertising support can’t serve as a revenue model to pay for generating online content. Technology, and our natural disinclination to accept advertising, increasingly makes it possible for the public to ignore advertising so online media have no viable method of generating higher cost content to replace broadcast content.
Then there’s the state of journalism. In various parts of the nation, the staff of failed newspapers have sought to launch web versions of their work and relied upon a traditional subscription/advertising economic model – and have been notoriously unsuccessful. A tremendous percentage of the news available online has come from traditional news media –which are increasingly failing in their primary businesses. So where will we get our news?

Like I said, it’s a rather depressing picture.

Public radio isn’t immune to these forces and the cover art on Garfield’s book, which contains the logos of various media organizations with a “scratch out” squiggle of lines over all of them, prominently includes NPR. Yet, Garfield seems to posit that the media system which could suffer the least is public broadcasting – because of its tighter connection to the public.

One dimension of Garfield’s thesis is that the public will increasingly “take charge” of media in America by both creating and consuming content – and that the best thing traditional outlets can do is “just listen” to them and follow that lead. That, of course, is quite consistent with public radio’s general values and approach so, Garfield theorizes, public radio may be better positioned in the new world media order than most other outlets.

I personally suspect that Garfield is right much more than wrong in his assessments of what is happening in our media world and where it will lead. His book, therefore, is both provocative and troubling – especially if, like me, you come from a world in which you have tended to think of media content as, at least potentially, an art form.

There doesn’t seem to me to be much artful about the media future Garfield describes – but The Chaos Scenario is well worth reading.

Ronald Kramer
Executive Director