New York Times Weighs in on the "Kids" Who Are Taking Over the Media World 

In my last Lowdown post Friday I had an item about 30-year-old Jay Penske, one of several young entrepreneurs who are building new media empires by taking advantage of the historic destruction the Internet is raining down on traditional media platforms. David Carr penned a very interesting article on this subject called "The Fall and Rise of Media" that appeared in the New York Times Sunday. 

Carr set the stage in his opening paragraph by noting how things used to be in the media business, writing "Historically, young women and men who sought to thrive in publishing made their way to Manhattan. Once there, they were told, they would work in marginal jobs for indifferent bosses doing mundane tasks and then one day, if they did all of that without whimper or complaint, they would magically be granted access to a gilded community, the large heaving engine of books, magazines and newspapers."

Contrasting that situation with the new media world we are seeing born before our eyes, Carr wrote this about the young people who have bypassed the old gatekeepers and built their own platforms to reach the world: "Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more 

David Carr
(photo from David's 
Facebook page)

informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well. For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

Many people employed by traditional media giants resent this change and it is hard to blame them after seeing how the shift has decimated their ranks. Carr characterized the old guard's predicament by noting, "For those of us who work in Manhattan media, it means that a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It’s a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that."

Carr mentioned the role that a company in our industry that you are all familiar with, Demand Media, is playing in the new scheme of things. He underscored how hard it is for old media to compete against the economic advantages that the web enjoys. Noting that big city writers were once paid as much as $4 a word Carr observed "Demand Media now tests headlines for reader salience and cranks out thousands of articles and videos daily that it pays about $20 apiece for." 

Even so, Carr believes there will always be a market for quality so even though the delivery mechanism is changing, some familiar brands (like the Times) are not likely to disappear entirely. "Certain stalwart brands will survive and even thrive because of a new scarcity of quality content for niche audiences that demand more than generic information," Carr wrote. As I wrote in my post Friday, that is exactly how I think things will play out as well. His is a very insightful article, so if you are one of the many domain developers who run or are planning to build media sites, be sure to check out Carr's entire piece here.