Fake Steve, Real Media, Unreal business models

Fake Steve's pithy - and sharply onserved - view of why Mainstream Media is dying because its cozying up to the (in)vested interests and dumbing down on dishing the dirt (he was referring to the difference between TechCrunch's investigation on scamvertising vs the New York Time (NYT) printing perfect PR puff rebuttal:

What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere "aggregators" and the "real journalism" gets done at places like the Times.

Because time after time, blogs are simply beating the shit out of the newspapers. They're the ones who still dare to go for the throat, while their counterparts at big newspapers just keep reaching for the shrimp cocktail.

As for the newspapers: Faced with their own demise, fearful of losing even more advertising, newspapers have made the huge mistake of becoming ever more timid, more cautious, more in bed with the companies they cover.

It's the exact opposite of what they should be doing. The truth is, if newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing -- muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit.

The NYT still has a good rep based on N years of very reasonable tech reporting, but these sorts of obvious puffpieces are like riding big snakes to the bottom of the board, requiring many more ladders to be climbed to get back to where they were. And little by little, snake piece by snake piece, they lose credibility

The issue is that their economic structures (high fixed costs and money increasingly only coming from brands and their agents) make this sort of behaviour optimal in the short term, even though in the long term they may well be dead.