A short movie trailer on journalism


Drive-inMindy McAdams on how mainstream media is much like a movie theater of her youth.

It’s like the movie theater in the small town where I grew up. A
small, family-owned theater, it only played second-run movies. It was
open only on Friday and Saturday. There was one screen, and one new
movie each week. From the time I was 9 or 10 years old, I went to that
theater every week, no matter what was playing. I had very little
access to movies otherwise.

Today I have Netflix, BitTorrent, and hundreds of cable TV channels.

The family closed that movie theater back in the early days of the VCR.

Likewise, consumers have other sources to meet their needs in addition to journalism. Her post is an interesting look at why journalism doesn’t carry much economic value and why, as Robert Picard put it, journalists deserve low pay, and what might be done to put the value back in journalism. Good reading.

(Apache Drive-In Theater in Globe, AZ, Submitted by R. Svirskas to Wired)