In this country, nobody ever did it better than Frank, typos and inaccuracies be damned.

Independent journalism blogs like Trente and J-Source offer some promise, but they're done by volunteers who have a habit of being overly polite when it comes to media criticism.

Facebook status updates are kind of lame, since it borders on impossible to link to them. A Twit is rarely of use for this purpose. Internal blog? Viable, but isn’t Weisblott always complaining that nobody reads David Olive’s?

Outside *watch blog (CBCWatch, QuebecorWatch, etc.)? You’d think those would work, but we have empirical evidence they don’t – dating all the way back to MediaWhoresOnline, MediaWhoresOnlineWatch, MediaWhoresOnlineWatchWatch, and MediaWhoresOnlineWatchWatchWatch and continuing with that troublesome group Weblog.

Related: Anonymous comments work as well in this context as they do on 4chan.

Also related: Critique one establishment (e.g., RyeHigh J-school) and a forum for criticism of another establishment will criticize you. In Soviet blogosphere, allies bash you!

"What I'm asking is for the media to understand that bullshitting your consumers just isn't going to work anymore. They're too smart to fall for it, and they're going to look elsewhere if they don't feel they can get the full story from you."

Although the impact of bullshitting isn't always obvious to enterprises and people don't always realise how different news outlets are owned by the same companies, the consequence is always there. I think the drop in revenue is a big indicator. Consumers are smart and if they feel not treated well, they will go elsewhere or tune out. This trend will become more dramatic as consumers get more and more comfortable with social tools.

Your post reminds me of a Mitch Joel Podcast I listened to a while back - I'm pretty sure it was this one: http://www.twistimage.com/podcast/archives/spos-190---nurturing-your-best-customers-with-joseph-jaffe/

Now that anyone can transmit almost any amount of information, anywhere, instantly, for free or almost free, the playing field has been leveled somewhat.

Big media still has something of an upper hand... the internet is still relatively new technology, and there are still a lot of people alive who remember the pre-internet world. Still others fear and actively resist through counterproductive lawmaking (ACTA) the inevitable coming changes. All this adds up to a climate where Big Media is slowly but constantly losing ground in both reader/viewership and advertising dollars, which they are trying desperately to make up for.

The thing is, they will never be able to compete, the internet offers information for free, and content providers usually have a direct and honest dialog with their audiences. A single skilled blogger can be a worthy competitor to a multi-million dollar news machine nowadays, at least in terms of audience.

Big content can't justify giving away content for free (they only do so grudgingly) and they can
t justify honesty with their audience. The profitability and advantages of these things are hard to put down in an Excel sheet, therefore big corporations won't do them. Either everyone who runs the company is net-savvy enough to be able to guide a company well as it sails the seas of internet culture, or, as is usually the case, you've got a bunch of old white guys who've got virus-ridden $3000.00 computers at home that they use to play solitare and surf the web on IE7. These are the guys who think paywalls on news sites are a good idea instead of a laughably stupid one. These are the guys who think no one wants to watch TV on their computer.

So basically we've got these dinosaurs running these huge media companies that are suddenly finding that the money to KEEP them running isn't there any more, so like a slowly starving beast they get more and more vicious, doing everything they can to survive in a landscape that just doesn't support them anymore. There's nothing they can do but get smaller and smarter, and while getting smaller is easy to model in Excel (just cross off a few employees) getting smarter isn't. Big Media is doomed to die, and to be replaced by Distributed Media.

All this is just my opinion, obviously.

If I may, I disagree about one very specific point:

"What I'm asking is for the media to understand that bullshitting your consumers just isn't going to work anymore. They're too smart to fall for it, and they're going to look elsewhere if they don't feel they can get the full story from you."

Consumers won't look elsewhere. I don't know if it's a question of being smart or not, but most of them don't care. Le Journal de Montréal has not lost readers after a one-year lock-out, and after many years of being blatantly one-sided about anything remotely related to Quebecor.

But that doesn't mean we should stop asking...;)