NP: The Verve, Forth

Lots of people have been quoting and linking to Maureen Tkacik's cover story in the Columbia Journalism Review on the current state of that business, but most have been focused on her ideas about the path forward.

I, on the other hand, was struck by a couple of things. First, I'm not going to lie -- the thought of a catfight between Tkacik and Ana Marie Cox, um, intrigues me. Second, this sounds awfully familiar:

When the Internet forced journalism to compete economically after years of monopoly, journalism panicked and adopted some of the worst examples of the nothing-based economy, in which success depends on the continued infantilization of both supply and demand. At the same time, journalism clung to its myths of objectivity and detachment, using them to dismiss the emerging blogger threat as something unserious and fundamentally parasitic, even as it produced a steady stream of obsessive but sneering trend stories on the blogosphere.

I may have mentioned this at least once before, but the music business also, when faced with a threat to its monopoly (and you can't look at CD prices in the early 2000s and tell me that wasn't monopolistic), panicked and held on to problematic pieces of an almost immediately outdated business model. Digital Rights Management would be the direct analogue to "myths of objectivity and detachment."

Anyway, I'm not sure there's anyone out there who thinks the music business did anything particularly well with regard to the threat and opportunity posed by the Internet music revolution, so you would think maybe someone might use some of those undervalued investigative journalism skills to look at what went wrong in music and see how to apply those learnings to the news media. And you know something like this will happen again somewhere else, too.