Alan Mut­ter’s Brain Drain post, is a reminder of how polit­ical many old media organ­iz­a­tions are:

young net nat­ives, for the most part, rank too low in the organ­iz­a­tions that employ them to be invited to the pivotal dis­cus­sions determ­in­ing the stra­tegic ini­ti­at­ives that could help their employ­ers sus­tain their franchises.

…Mem­bers of the wired gen­er­a­tion say the pro­cess, bur­eau­cracy and cau­tion com­mon to most media com­pan­ies steals spon­taneity and edgi­ness away from ideas that could be appeal­ing to their peers.

It was ever thus. At the start of the 1990s, when CBS News used to travel in high style, I wrote a naïve memo sug­gest­ing that with Hi-8 cam­eras (remem­ber them?) and low-cost air­line fares we could revolu­tion­ise news­gath­er­ing — expand it and cut costs. The memo went down like the pro­ver­bial bag of cold sick with fel­low staffers who — prob­ably rightly — saw me as an irrit­at­ing little irk.

Instead, CBS News car­ried on doing what it did, while I learned not to write stu­pid memos, and instead con­cen­trated on find­ing someone to let me go to more dan­ger­ous and inter­est­ing places.

Even­tu­ally, in my early 30s, I got a chance at Chan­nel 5 to do some of the rad­ical things that could have been done in my early 20s. But by that time the money was dis­ap­pear­ing from tele­vi­sion news faster than viewers…