insteins dissolved their relationship with Disney. Disney, however, kept the Miramax brand and the entire Miramax library of films.
Yet this fissure did not end the Weinsteins’ careers. In 2005, the brothers founded a new independent film company, the Weinstein Co., which has had some success with films including Vicky Cristina Barcelona and The Queen, as well as the Michael Moore documentaries Sicko and Capitalism: A Love Story. However, when even independent film legends such as the Weinsteins have only limited success, it’s clear that success is hard to come by. The A.V. Club—a companion to the satirical newspaper the The Onion—asked in January 2010, just after Disney closed Miramax for good, “How much longer will the studio ‘indie’ model be viable at all?”Scott Tobias, “R.I.P. (Companies Are People, Too, Division): Miramax 1979–2010,” A.V. Club, January 28, 2010, http://www.avclub.com/articles/rip-companies-are-people-too-division-miramax-1979,37639/. Today, there are few true “indie” studios left, and several major studios have closed their boutique studios, such as Warner Independent and Paramount Vantage. But even if some are questioning the economics of the indie-studio models of the 1980s and 1990s, it seems that there will always be an artistic drive for independent film—and, eventually, someone’s bound to make the economics of it work again.
In many ways, the Internet has been a game-changer throughout the media industry. However, a few things have stayed the same; major media companies own popular media content sites such as Hulu and YouTube and control access to a great deal of online information. Even bloggers, who have found a new role as drivers of the media cycle, are at a disadvantage when it comes to the ability to generate original content. They tend to drive much of their traffic by reposting and adding commentary to news stories from established media outlets. One large and relatively influential outlet, the Drudge Report, is mainly composed of links to outside news organizations rather than original journalism. It gained fame during the late 1990s for breaking the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal—albeit by posting about how Newsweek killed reporter Michael Isikoff’s story on the matter.BBC News, “Scandalous Scoop Breaks Online,” January 25, 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/clinton_scandal/50031.stm. Still, the economic complications of the Internet have changed the calculus of media permanently, a status made clear by the drastic increase in free content over the past decade.
Choose a media outlet such as the Washington Post or CNN and visit its website to determine its parent company. Often this will be in the “Corporate” or “About Us” sections. Then visit the Columbia Journalism Review’s resource “Who Owns What?” at http://www.cjr.org/resources/index.php. Consider and respond to the following questions: