It's no news that professional journalism, especially of the print variety, is in an ever desperate crisis. The failing economy has only exacerbated the crisis as well as the desperation.
That desperation becomes ever more apparent as the brain trust at the top of mainstream news organizations lashes out at the market, grasping for a stronghold that will preserve what has already disappeared. The more desperate the move, the more evident it becomes that the (old, white, male) leadership of these organizations is completely lost in the (not so new anymore) Internet reality and are, in fact, the largest barrier to their organizations' survival.
Witness this demonstration of ineptitude by the Associated Press:
In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness. A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website.
The AP's official channel on YouTube.
Which displays codes for embedding the videos.
A feature that can be turned off.
What is more clueless—not knowing how to operate your own YouTube channel, attacking your affiliate for using it, or not even being aware that you have a YouTube channel? And then to think that it'd be a good idea to emulate the strategy of the music labels? You know, because that's worked out so well.
At what point do the shareholders (or members, in the case of the AP) of these organizations realize that top management is in the deep weeds and should be relieved from the angst of trying to navigate out of it?
Congrats to local journalists Trace Sharp and Christian Grantham on breaking this story and achieving national (even international) coverage of it.
