Analysis of contemporary roadblocks to publishing original insight and commentary

Off the Agenda (3)

Complicating the picture still further is a certain structural remoteness on the part of advertisers--the people who ultimately determine whether a publication or broadcast will survive or vanish--from the way a communications outlet is experienced in real time (to borrow a term from computer science) by its audience.

While advertising buyers try to keep up with the media, they can't possibly read or watch or listen to everything that goes out to the public--especially not at the time it is going out. For the most part, they have to form their impressions after the fact, supplementing the raw numerical data on circulation or ratings by going through back copies or old scripts or old tapes.

When taken out of their original time context, these materials can undergo remarkable transformations. Articles that, in their time, contributed little or nothing to a subject that had already been worked to death tend to appear as if they were pertinent, timely, and "right on top of the issues." Meanwhile, more original and genuinely informative material that didn't either start or follow broader reporting trends has a way of looking strangely out of touch.

If a good original observation or idea is likely to look merely odd in the all-important advertising buyers' retrospective view, and if it requires somebody to gamble on a subjective sense of what's noteworthy rather than follow what's been tabulated about audience reading habits in narrowly-defined subject areas, and if no matter what readers may actually think of a piece, it's not likely to register in the statistical formulations by which communications executives are guided, it's hardly reasonable to expect good, original observations and ideas to be chosen over "safer" kinds of material.

It is far more reasonable to expect what we have today.

It is only to be expected that marketing imperatives would create a kind of formula (however inadvertent) for blandness and "pack" writing--including not only "pack" reporting, but also "pack" commentary and analysis, "pack" features, even standardized "pack" styles of humor.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1990 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.