Flyover Country
30 March 2007 - 12 ניסן 5767 by Huw
When I worked at 815 ECUSA, there was some discussion of relocating the National Offices to something more midwestern: say, St Louis or Indianapolis. After some hemming and hawing, it was realised that (a) international visitors like Emmanuel Kolini and George Carey paid rather a lot to get to us in NYC and, should we be located in some other place, they’d pay rather a lot more. Additionally, since those places were not (at the time) considered “major hubs”, people from around the US would have to pay more to get to us too. (Don’t forget Teh Internets were just getting off the ground then.)
Today there’s a post on GetReligion asking the same sort of questions about a news organisation:
If a national paper or network were based in the Midwest, what stories would get more attention?
I don’t know enough about the media issues - or the educational issues - that tmatt raises to say *anything* intelligent on them. But what about the demographics? Would not the newspapers reach the same conclusions as the church did? And what about population? Can you draw any boundaries around Indiana and Illinois, Kansas and Kentucky (the area mentioned in the article) that make the population there equal to the population on the coasts? Is there any financial reason to allow that smaller population to offset even NYC? (Near as I can tell from the internet the entire population of Illinois is less than NYC, Wyoming is less than San Francisco).
Given that media are capitalist, profit-earning ventures beholden to their shareholders, who would be able to justify pitching stories that sold only or primarily to “flyover country”?
This is not to be read denying the ability to make media *for* that market. Mel Gibson proves that a valid venture. But specialities can be made in movies or TV exactly because the vast majority of the productions are geared to the majority. A news company might be able to open a branch there - but never the home office.
