The Barbell Model Of Media
Felix Salmon weighs in on the media jobs:
My feeling is that there’s media jobs are looking pretty much like a barbell these days: you either work for a last-man-standing monolith or else you’re part of a small and nimble team. It’s the media properties in the middle — regional newspapers, small cable-TV properties, anything with high fixed costs and less than a million paying customers — which are suffering the most.
This is a pretty interesting theory, not the least of which because it can be summarized with a tidy infographic some social media expert really ought to make so that we can all better grasp the concept.
But I’d quibble with the notion that the middle of the barbell (the bar) can be treated as a single entity. In my mind there is still monetizable value in regional newspapers, even those with fewer than a million paying customers. While they may be suffering more than giant media conglomorates they are distinctly more viable, in my opinion, than secondary intern/national newspapers like the Washington Post, a point Matthew Yglesias echoes. The Boston Globe and Baltimore Sun, two papers with a rich tradition of broad coverage, should probably be a warning to the Post.
It’s easy to see how a regional paper could adjust towards a streamlined, hyper local model that offers content relevant to its immediate audience while leaving broader coverage to the NYT, AP, Reuters, etc. It’s not as easy to see how a monolith like the Washington Post could so easily change course. But it probably will have to, right?
