the word studio notebook

Today in It’s Funny Until it Happens to You

newsweek:

Rachel Sklar’s “Next Year in Media” piece for the Daily Beast is smart and insightful. It’s also, here, a little mean (emphasis ours):

At the end of 2009, Jennifer 8. Lee took a buyout from The New York Times. I wonder if her 9,250 Twitter followers really care. I first saw her name on Gawker, and have read more about her than I have by her. Not that she isn’t a fine writer with fine work, but the point is: She’s a brand. She’s a brand that can go anywhere, and though the Times certainly helps as a launching pad and validator, her brand exists apart from that. So does Andrew Ross Sorkin’s. The most influential people who read him do so on their BlackBerries every morning before they even get to the paper. (And his mug on Morning Joe every other day doesn’t hurt.) And I get my Chris Cillizza fix via Twitter and email more than I read him at The Washington Post.

The point is, those who diversified across platforms and invested in themselves in 2009 are now positioned to go on to the next thing. Is that disloyal to your employer? Of course not—smart employers will recognize the value in personal brand extension, and encourage it. It’s only the weak and unconfident that are threatened by such things. 2010 has no time for you.

The “weak and unconfident” aren’t abstractions; they’re people, often good and smart journalists who have seen the entire terms of their employment radically change. This all seems so easy to say “Get with the program, Grandpa” for people who are younger, or more adaptable, but it ignores some very human realities.

And you know, your time is gonna come too. Imagine it’s 2030. Nobody even owns a TV anymore, or gets information printed on paper. Nick Denton is the new Rupert Murdoch. Top bloggers make $1 million/ year (inflation!). The Awl has had a lucrative 20-year run, and won every award there is. Mainstream media is the Web/mobile.

And somebody invents a way for people to eat information. Like, you go to the corner store and eat a cookie, and the contents of that day’s Gawker go straight to your brain. Suddenly, all news outlets are bakeries, and all the people who recognize that this new, edible news is so much better (and it is!) than that old way of getting information—reading things on a backlit scren—start telling the old guard, who have become comfortable doing this a certain way, that they’re weak, and unconfident, and that 2030 has no time for them.

For many of us, this new media seems fun, and natural, and so much better than the old way. But that doesn’t mean that people who don’t feel the same way are week, or morons.

Here’s to compassion. Here’s to empathy.