The New York Post's Page Six (one of the bigger NYC gossip columns, for those who don't know what I'm talking about) has done what some said would never happen: cited the Columbia Journalism Review. The item, which ran yesterday, is a response to Hud Morgan, a rival gossip columnist who we interviewed at CJR Daily last week.
Perhaps I've been consuming too much media (or maybe I just need a vacation), but I find this hysterical. After all, I thought we at CJR were propping up the decaying cathedral of mainstream journalism ...
I have an article just published by CJR (the magazine) about the Nielsen television ratings. Here's the key excerpt:
The central problem is that what Nielsen was originally set up to do — measure programs broadcast by the big networks to viewers who watch in their homes — is increasingly no longer the norm. Just as the Internet has transformed print media, technology is radically transforming the way we watch TV. Consumers can watch television without their television sets, by using broadband Internet connections to stream video online, or even watching on their cell phones. Digital video recorders, now in about 6 percent of homes, have made what the industry calls “time-shifted viewing” much easier, even for those who used to leave their VCR’s blinking “12:00.” And video-on-demand, once the realm only of pay-per-view movies and sporting events, has begun allowing viewers to watch shows, including evening news broadcasts, that they once could only watch in real time. Television is, increasingly, an on-demand medium. ...
While the television industry has always griped about Nielsen’s various shortcomings, this is something entirely different, and unsettling to the television world.
You can read the whole thing over at CJR.
I'll be on Wisconsin Public Radio's MediaTalk today at 6 p.m. eastern time, discussing the Project for Excellence in Journalism's new report on the state of the news media. You can listen live over the Web.