Friday, January 28, 2011

the media mercato

The brownian movement of the media executives that has occured during the last two months, is very worrying, according to one of my friend journalists who has been following the scene for many years.
Why that worry? According to him, it shows the deep crisis of the traditional media who try desperately to find new men or women to solve problems which are due to structural change. It also increases the gap between the low income of the young journalists and the extravagant salaries of the top executives. A graduate of a school of journalism will be happy to start with 2000 euros a month. His boss will make 30 000.
And yet, who can expect that Nicolas Demorand will improve the financial situation of Libération or the new chairman of le Figaro will increase the lagging circulation of the daily. Will Denis Olivennes create a miracle at Europe 1 after several years of stand by at le Nouvel Observateur? Nobody can believe that.
The fact is that there is a crisis of the media and not a crisis of information. People are more and more eager to have access to the news and even willing to pay if the information is really useful to them. But, they are not carried away any more by the average media while Internet and applications offer so many intriguing possibilities. It will take years to adjust to this new scenery. For that purpose, the expensive media mercato of to day is useless. It is even counterproductive.