Traditional media is experiencing what often feels like a slow-motion nervous breakdown, which would hardly come as news to anyone operating in the thick of that. Yet occasionally a week comes along with ostensibly distinct stories that help crystallize the larger picture, almost like the cop finally piecing things together at the end of “The Usual Suspects.”
In just the last few days, a handful of reports speak to trends that coalesce into a single clarifying moment: Old media is limping along on wobbly legs, if not its death bed yet, and efforts to save it are merely prolonging the inevitable.
A shift in consumption patterns for entertainment, news and information has hamstrung many long-established means of disseminating content, while pushing newer forms to the forefront.
Clocking each of these developments as they fly by — sometimes while on the move ourselves, increasingly via our phones — the connections aren’t always obvious. So let’s pause for a breath and take inventory of this week’s media news, and the changing of the guard that it reveals.
- On Tuesday, TheWrap covered a Reuters poll that found social media surpassed TV and websites as the preferred source for news, the first time that’s happened. Driven by younger consumers, 54% reported accessing news via social media, compared to 50% and 48% for TV and the web, respectively.
- The same day, ratings service Nielsen reported that streaming accounted for 45% of TV usage, representing a surge of more than 70% over the past four years that has lifted that form of distribution to narrowly exceed the combined figure for broadcast (20%) and cable (24%).
Part of that shift has been driven by YouTube, and as if on cue:
- On Wednesday the company boasted its short-form video platform YouTube Shorts has hit 200 billion streams, a Carl Sagan-like number that reflects the increased popularity of bite-sized programming consumption, which competes with traditional production in the battle for attention and eyeballs.
Shorter version: Teens and young adults (especially) are spending less time watching movies and TV shows, while allocating more to snippets of video and getting their news from TikTok, not those stodgy cable networks watched by their parents and grandparents.
But wait, there’s more. Netflix unveiled a groundbreaking deal Wednesday to carry the output from French broadcaster TF1, an agreement TF1 Group CEO Rodolphe Belmer described in its announcement as becoming necessary “as viewing habits shift toward on-demand consumption and audience fragmentation increases” — a trend that has crossed international borders.
Finally, Amazon issued a memo that served as a not-so-subtle warning to its employees about the impact of artificial intelligence, noting there will be layoffs associated with AI picking up tasks performed by actual humans, while offering the only modestly reassuring aside that some new jobs will be created as a byproduct of that shift.
So basically, “Get on board, or get out of the way.” Although frankly, a host of recent headlines have made clear AI’s impact remains unpredictable enough that it won’t necessarily spare early adopters either, in the same way monsters in old movies frequently kill the mad scientist that unleashes them first.
The main problem, grappled with since the transition from print to online and more recently the great migration to streaming that began with the launch of multiple services (including Disney+ and Apple TV+) in 2019, is the uncertainty about when these lines will intersect — whether newer revenue streams can supplant old ones, such as linear TV, before those models slide off a cliff.
The newspaper industry dealt with that game of digital chicken first, as the web gobbled up its classified advertising business and distribution of print editions, falling victim to those forces despite the alarm bells sounded about trading in “print dollars for digital dimes.” Although most legacy publications have managed to survive, with a few notable exceptions like the New York Times, it’s generally in dramatically scaled-down form, both in terms of the size of their staffs and the scope of their ambitions.
Step back a little further, and it’s easy to weave more pixels into the picture, like Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal’s spinoffs of their declining cable assets, and whether the economies of scale associated with mergers and acquisitions can be enough to justify anteing up for an entity whose trend lines point in the wrong direction.
In “The Usual Suspects,” the messy cop defends his scattered work area by telling a colleague, “It all makes sense when you look at it right. You gotta stand back from it.”
In the daily scramble of these jobs, including the race to cover these stories, it can be difficult to take the time to seek perspective or try connecting the dots, making things appear messier, even chaotic. Whether the view is from up close or gains clarity from far away, though, the prospects for traditional media don’t paint a comforting picture.
