PressEthic

To stay hip, news needs to go the way of Ipods and Itunes, says David Carr. They worked for the downward-spiraling music industry, so they must be able to work for the newspaper industry. What we need, he says, is an Ipod-like device that constantly spins out new headlines and has “an iTunes-like array of content available at a ubiquitous volume and a low, digestible price."

“Readers no longer care so much who you are, they just want to know what you know . . . That may sound grim for big media brands, the kind of proposition that will not provide enough cash flow to finance a squad of reporters examining what a hurricane left behind or venturing out onto the streets of Baghdad. But in a frantic age where the quality of the information can be critical, being a reliable news source humming away in everyone's backpack sounds just useful enough to be a business.”

Sounds great. We'll all be data consuming machines. But I wouldn’t be so quick to discount brand loyalty; just because it works for one industry doesn’t mean it’ll work for the other.

As Carr rightly says, online downloading has created a culture shift in the music industry. Product isn’t a defined by its brand, but by the two and three minute increment.

But blogs, the biggest innovation in news media, have done just the opposite. Whether it’s gawker, a milblog or andrewsullivan, people read what they read for one reason: brand loyalty. While blog loyalty might differ from newspaper loyalty, readers still choose the NY Post over the NY Times—whether online or in print—for pretty distinct reasons. And while more people might be switching to Google and Yahoo news, the latter at least recognizes the importance of loyalty. Otherwise it wouldn’t have hired its own reporters.