David Carr welcomes our new disruptor overlords

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David Carr’s column today is a beautifully written paean to an era of media that is coming to a close, a rubric he’s gotten very good at at musing on. For example, he laments the demise of business journalism, the demise of the glossy magazine era through the lens of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine launch party and the demise of the local newspaper as a viable business model. Through no fault of his own, for a media reporter, David Carr sure writes a lot of obits these days.

It’s both sad and true that the old ways of media are dying. But something about his latest column hit me in the wrong way. I think it’s the ending, which seems to be the most quoted in blogs and Twitter:

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more 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.

Well, no. We’re all on the same island. I know, David, you meet fresh young things backed with, say, Barry Diller’s money or a Google pedigree, who have great ideas for the future of news media, but honestly, not all of us set out in this business to be entrepreneurs or moguls. Most of us wanted exactly the career you had (if not the life): sitting behind a desk, typing, reporting, explaining, communicating. It’s too easy to dismiss, with some McInerney-style prose and a wave at your future bosses, that the media business in the midst of a massive disruption, and it’s all Going. To. Be. OK. Thing is, if we know anything about disruption, it destroys the wealth creating machines that previously dominated the industry, and replaces them with brilliant but embryonic companies that, for a long while, generate very little money for anyone, least of all the employees. And the thing about money is, we need it to live, and we need a lot of it to live in New York.

Disruptors are necessary, inevitable, and overall, positive. But please don’t make it sound like we all just need to keep checking our email until the bright young things figure out what to do with us and send us job offers. I think my ultimate beef is that Carr cleaned up, through his fluid prose, a messy, ugly and scary cycle of death and rebirth that we’re all currently experiencing, experimenting and surviving in. That’s why his column feels like an attempt to swaddle a fetus when it’s just started to crown, or asking grandpa to spend his last few nights on Earth in a coffin, just to be ready. We’re just not there yet, David.

If you don’t believe me, the Journal has a story on Tim Armstrong’s new idea for content-generation over at Aol. The spun-off company is going to use computers and advertisers to tell its editors what kinds of stories to assign, and then hire cheap freelancers to pump out whatever content the crowds are searching for on Google that day. To wit:

AOL says it will pay free-lancers based on how much its technology predicts marketers will pay to advertise next to their articles or videos. It says that will range from nothing upfront, with a promise to share ad revenues the article generates, to more than $100 per item.

Armstrong’s model is quite smart– in a diabolical sort of way. By pouring chum into the enormous feedback loop that is the Internet, he hopes to scrape a few more pennies away from his eyeball and ad-dollar competition. Great, but this is the sort of thing you can do only when you completely detach yourself from the idea that news stories have an objective value, one beyond merely satisfying readers by providing a story they were searching for. What about the stories they don’t know they need or want to read? Not to mention, where do these massive search queries come from anyway? Sure, some grow organically, from a message board, but much of the story generation that leads to search engine traffic comes from enterprising reporters hired by major newspapers. It’s scary to think that an army of Aol computers and freelancers will be standing by, ready to “flood the zone” on a story, the way newspapers once did, but only after a newspaper or some other external factor has decisively proven that readers will click on the headline.

Despite how that all sounds, I’m not criticizing the innovation on Aol’s part. (Assuming Armstrong and his team are smart enough, as they seem to be, to continue to develop and grow the idea, to throw resources at it, and to prove that computer-driven editorial decisions will be passed through a human BS detector before they are assigned to freelancers that won’t have the experience to know better or the standing to push back on dumb stories.)

But, plans like Aol’s are the reason I can’t quite get as excited as David Carr does about “bright young things” sitting around on their netbooks, plotting to become the next big media moguls. Reading Dan Roth’s story on Demand Media in Wired provided, I think, a more critical look at what dot com moguls have in store for the media business, when left unchecked. (note, previous sentence edited from original for clarity). The business models in journalism clearly have to change, and change quickly. But dreaming up ways to piggyback on the work of newspapers and reporters while the companies those reporters work for continue their slow fade into irrelevance hardly seems long-term viable, to me anyway.

In the music business, post-Napster disruption, Musicians survived, got better at their jobs, and provided more innovation in music because they have been able to substitute recording contracts with touring. But for all the successes in music now, there are many more bands out there fighting for a slice of the pie. For some, there is more money, for many, there’s just barely enough, but for all, there’s far more risk involved in quitting your day jobs, buying a van, and hitting the road to play bars, clubs and cafes every night, for weeks at a time. Honest question: Do we want journalism to echo the music business?

If blogs:touring gigs::newspapers:recording contracts, I’m not sure the news business can be run out of a camper van as effectively as a rockabilly band can be. And no one wants to hear a journalist try to sing.