Alas, poor Couric: The question of media

Alas, poor Couric

That’s the title of the lead feature in New York Magazine on Katie Couric today by Joe Hagan which runs, by our computer count, about 6,000 words for 80 graphs.

The Beacon Journal covers the essence of the story in a page one “FirstWord” wth a mug shot.

“Katie Couric says the move to CBS would have been less appealing if she had known she’d be doing the more traditional CBS Evening News broadcast that she anchors now. People are very resistant to change,” Couric said in an interview with New York magazine. “The biggerst mistake we made is we tried new things.”

That about sums it up. But if you click on the headline you will go to a glitzy report illustrated with this graphic.

The Couric piece and one on the Patrick Carney/Denise Grollmus wedding on Sunday, however, help to illustrate the media problem today. The newspaper (print media) does not provide the space or design capabilites often possible in the online newspaper. Perhaps this is why younger news seekers prefer the web and have quit reading newspapers. Older readers would rather have it all presented to them in a printed publication they trust a little better to give it to them straight. The Couric experiment provides the question of trust and reliability. (Is it news I can trust or entertainment and someone’s opinion.) In either case, someone must always gather the news and write it. Now the question is how best to do this in a reliable, trustworthy fashion.