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 naive 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…