Doug: Dr Rockwell, A Prescription?

John: We’re getting close to the end of our conversation, but there are still things I wanted to ask you. One, which you bring up in your last post is about how cultural coverage is pitched. I get that in a mass-culture world the way to get audiences is to try to appeal to a general reader. Unfortunately this has come to mean dumbing down rather than being smart and accessible.
But I think that the strategies that work in a mass culture model actually work against you in a world of niches. That is – as people can choose more and more specifically what they want, they’re less willing to accept the blandly generic. Mass culture works because, while it might not totally satisfy all that many people, it’s inoffensive enough that many people will accept it when their choices are limited.
The genius of newspapers back when was that they aggregated readers with specific interests. By offering lots of variety, newspapers collected many audiences, which in turn supported the main news-gathering activities.
Somewhere along the way though, the idea somehow became that every reader ought to be able to read every story. Pitching everything at an eighth grade reading level worked for a while. But if you print bland dumbed-down stories about culture, the readers who actually know something about culture are going to be the first to jump ship. Isn’t that alienating the very readers you’re trying to reach? The problem with that famous A1 NYT Brittney Spears story was not that it was Brittney Spears on A1 but that it was just plain dumb.
Probably every newspaper in America is rethinking how it covers culture as newspapers ride a long slow decline in print circulation. Sadly, the solution at the vast majority of papers is to parade a succession of bland pop-culture features guaranteed to turn off anyone who actually knows something about the topic. This also means that more traditional cultural coverage gets cut back and blanderized.
Good critics are leaving the profession at an alarming rate because the kind of product they’re being asked to write isn’t interesting to them. And sadly, the dumbing-down strategy isn’t working to attract new readers, anyway.
Interest in culture has never been higher. Audiences have never been bigger. Yet outside of about a dozen major newspapers, cultural coverage has been cut back and bland increasingly rules. One of the few places where this isn’t generally true is the Times, which has expanded the resources it devotes to covering culture. I realize the Times is in a class by itself as a national paper, but I also assume the paper wouldn’t be taking culture seriously if there wasn’t a good business reason too. is there something the Times knows about cultural coverage that others don’t? Maybe related to that – you were the Times first pop music critic. Is it significant that the paper chose someone for the job who came with high-culture cred?
Lastly – one observation related to your comment about bland corporate culture. I’ve always found it weirdly fascinating by the way many of America’s most established corporations advertise. They try to convince people that if you use their products you’re being a rebel or individual or different, when in fact their fare is the most common, least individual and least rebellious. The spirit of the 60s has been corporatized and repackaged and co-opted as an ideal, turned into a Disney ride.
Digital distribution has given people almost infinite choice, and it turns out that they have very individual taste when they’re given choices as per Chris Anderson’s LongTail observations. Some are asking whether we need critics anymore, when everyone armed with an opinion can express it on the internet. I’m of the opinion that as choices become more overwhelming and information overload sets in, that critics are more valuable than ever. The question Dr. Rockwell, is how do we make a new system that can support them?