In 1928, when William Paley left his family cigar business to build CBS radio, the conventional wisdom was that radio would never be a big business. Years later, Edward R. Murrow was denied access to the British Press Club because it wasn’t thought to be possible for a real journalist to work in any medium other than print. Again and again, the conventional wisdom was dismissive of every new medium; each new communications technology was seen as a fad, a tool for demagoguery, or the end of journalism. And always these skeptics were proven wrong, usually by newbies who didn’t care about the old way things were done. Murrow for example, never made the transition from print to broadcast—he started in radio and moved to TV—so he had no bad habits to unlearn and could speak clearly into the microphone or camera with an emotional fluency most print journalists lacked. One of Murrow’s contemporaries, a writer named Robert Landry, summed up Murrow’s advantages: “Murrow has three advantages over correspondents for the greatest American newspapers: 1) He beats the newspapers by hours; 2) He reaches millions who otherwise have to depend on provincial newspapers for their foreign news; 3) He writes his own headlines. That is to say he emphasizes what he wishes—whereas the newspaper correspondent writes in cablese.” Today we see a similar phenomena happen again and again. The media industry establishment initially dismisses, and then embraces, the new communication technologies the internet has given us: blogging, Twitter, social, mobile, web video. And the people who pioneer the new formats, do the most innovative and creative work, and who bring the rest of the public from skepticism to enthusiasm, are mostly the ones who don’t care what the establishment thinks, who come to the industry with a fresh mind without anything to unlearn, and who have a broadly optimistic disposition toward new communications technology.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:55:30 +0000
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