Media in an Age of Chaos

New York, N.Y. — Why is it that whenever I land here, in the media capital of the U.S., something back home in California decides to jar me by changing, without any warning? Now, obviously, we all know that Yahoo is enduring one of the most painful identity crises since Oedipus, but why exactly, did the company choose this particular day to launch a redesign of its home page?

And the logo is purple and today is Thursday. Anyone out there old enough to catch the references?

Probably not.  No problem.

On the way to my hotel in the theater district tonight, I passed the NBC building, with its comforting red ticker tape announcing that Obama has chosen so-and-so for such-and-such, and so on. Later, at dinner with a playwright friend, I listened to how the financial crisis is afflicting New York’s creative class.

Imagine this. One of the very first plays you ever wrote is finally discovered, years later, by a major producer on Broadway. He loves it! So he begins the process of negotiating with you to acquire the rights, so he can turn it into…a musical. Okay, you guess that’s okay. After all, musicals are suddenly once again all the rage on Broadway, as predictable a cycle as the raising and lowering of skirt lengths.

Hey, forget your doubts. This is Broadway, the big time, you are about to become famous, or at least potentially capable of selling your next big idea to somebody like him. He’s off to L.A., probably to raise money to produce your play, you imagine. But then, suddenly, he goes MIA. A week passes, then two, then three. Still no word, so you are getting paranoid and tempted to send one of those emails we all wish, sooner or later, that we didn’t send.

Well, that was my friend’s dilemma. As I listened, I suddenly realized that one of the costs of this recession, most certainly soon to become a depression, will be to kill ideas such as my friend’s just like SIDS kills a baby. Furthermore, since at the heart of any media company are certain creative impulses — original ideas birthed inside the minds of writers, photographers, filmmakers, painters, dancers, journalists, etc. — much more than corporate edifices are at risk here.

Face it. Artistic impulses serve as the fragile beating heart at the center of all media companies. We may be hard-edged businesspeople, or pretend that we are, but inside we chose this path in life because we love and we support art. We believe in it.

As the conventional channels of media disappear, one by one, in this revolutionary new age, who or what will step up to save this human impulse so at risk now that entire aspects of the human condition seem on the verge of falling back into the shadows, undocumented, unspoken?

That, of course, is one of the key questions greeting our new President in 2009, much as it was 76 years ago, when another new President uttered a phrase for the ages:  “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In case you need a reminder, FDR put artists who were at risk, literally, of starving to death, to work, and they created memorable social realism pieces that to this day remind us that no matter how bad it gets, there is always a story to tell.

And that, in essence, is why we have, and need, media.