10 Trends in Media

Peter Kann has this excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal on 10 trends in the press that need fixing. (Via GetReligion's Mollie.

I won't list all of them, but it is a great list that should have most people nodding halfway through it. Several of them have to do with the blurring of news with something else (whether opinion, advertising, or entertainment). For me, this is a critical problem with the modern press.

The so-called new journalism, which could be quite entertaining, is also so completely submerged in the opinions and biases of the writer that one cannot treat the stories as factual. If one tells a story of a car wreck from one witness's perspective, is it factual? Well, yes, from that perspective. But what about others?

This is where much of modern journalism is falling down. In its attempt to humanize stories from environmentalism to unemployment to war, journalists are creating impressions that may be true on a microbial level, but may not be true in a larger sense.

While Kann's list is not exhaustive, it is instructive. I only wish I were more hopeful that journalists would take it to heart, but I'm just not that hopeful.