SAN FRANCISCO -- In these days of the perpetually "soft" online ad market, when Internet news sites are struggling to reach profitability or just to stay alive, it's odd to hear someone speak optimistically about how the Internet will give the big media a run for its money.
But Ben Bagdikian, the veteran journalist and media critic, thinks new technologies and the novel avenues for publication they provide could play a part in denting what he calls "the media monopoly."
That monopoly is a subject that preoccupies Bagdikian. His most famous book is called The Media Monopoly, and he was one of the first critics to suggest that the concentration of media ownership in a handful of multinational companies would have a stifling effect on culture.
But he said, during an hour-long speech at a Borders bookstore here Wednesday evening, that each time a new version of his book is released, "it's already obsolete the day it's published." Technology and the business world advance at too rapid a pace for him to record the changes, he said.
Bagdikian, who was once dean of the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, suggested that such advances could perhaps pose a problem for entrenched media giants. Individuals' increased power to sidestep those giants and publish their own pieces is an encouraging sign, he said.
As an example, Bagdikian told the story of his older sister, Lydia, who left a trove of documents when she died in the early 1990s that Bagdikian realized was a draft of a memoir she'd never published.
His sister's memoir recounted the Bagdikian family's exodus from Turkey after World War II, fleeing across Europe and eventually to the United States. It was a story brimming with geopolitical detail and with personal trauma: Bagdikian's mother died, from tuberculosis, not long after the family reached the United States.
"I felt this was a story that must be told," Bagdikian said.
So he spent around $3,000 to have his sister's handwritten documents scanned, then he published them as a 400-page book, with a price of around $30 per book.
The process would cost even less today and is always becoming cheaper, which is why Bagdikian believes that self-publication, combined with the Internet marketing of books, could be the way many new writers publish their works.
Bagdikian also described how his long history in journalism has been affected by the advent of new technologies over the years.
He began his career at a manual typewriter, an instrument that was not kind about mistakes and required you to know how you were going to finish a sentence before you started it, he joked.
"There was at time when carbon paper was the way you duplicated something, and I used to send my articles into magazines (through) Western Union," he said.
Now, though he's of a generation that he concedes is not very savvy about computers and still thinks "if (I) push the wrong key either God or Bill Gates himself will strike me dead," Bagdikian uses a word processor and the Internet for research, which he says speeds up his writing considerably.
He did say that one of the ways in which the Internet might hurt authors is if it makes it easier for others to steal their intellectual property.
Asked by a member of the audience what he thought of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that has been a thorn in the side of many in the tech community, Bagdikian said he supported the provisions that extended copyright terms to authors, but he thought that some aspects of that law should be amended. He said he was not familiar enough with its intricacies to know what specifically needed to be done.
Bagdikian also said, finally, that he believed that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were "being used as an excuse" by the government to justify increased secrecy, and he is very concerned with the Bush Administration's tendency not to fully explain its wartime policies.
Bagdikian knows well the chill of wartime secrecy: He was an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post when that paper, along with The New York Times, won a Supreme Court battle over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret documents that detailed the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.
