Media celebrities, from on-air personnel to executives, reaped the high salaried rewards of a high margin business model based on promoting “air” time.

Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman suggests that the CNBC decision to part ways with ex-news chief Jonathan Wald reflects the new budget reality predicated by the slow decline of the broadcast media combined with an advertising recession:

The Wald story is a defining moment. You can call it, with apologies to author Malcolm Gladwell, the tipping point of the news industry.

CNBC put a line in the sand for all media companies. It’s sending a message to the world that it wouldn’t pay up to keep Wald, one of the brightest executives around.

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Today, there’s further evidence of media retrenching… Harper Collins Lays Off Two Executives. It’s notable that “superstar” industries are downsizing top down, presaging a new management structure that processes instead of making deals.

The surprise announcement of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican VP candidate highlights the relevancy of different media in reporting breaking news:

1. Twitter breaks the news

2. Concurrently, TV news – MSNBC, CNN, CNBC – gathers initial pundit reactions that generally mirror the Twitter feeds. The online business news sites also report the news, but don’t seem to have real time access to pundits for commentary

3. Finally, about one hour later after the news breaks, the Anchorage Daily News (and by extension, other newspaper websites) provide a snippet announcement with no editorial, interpretation or commentary

4. Penultimately, newsprint publication 24 hours later with the morning paper. Simply put, stale news makes newsprint irrelevant from a knowledge management standpoint.

5. News weeklies – Time, Newsweek, The Economist, even People – distill the reactions and interpret the breaking news. Some do it better than others.

Friend Jeff Corbett’s appearance on CNBC’s On The Money program is a good example of how social media players are becoming fixtures in the mass media.

The problem Jeff faces in his interview is common with anybody who has interfaced with the soundbite nature of broadcast programming. The mass media understands its audience and will leverage specific themes to “hook” that audience. In Jeff’s case, the hook was evident in the title of his piece “Confessions of a Mortgage Industry Insider”, a relevant consumer topic. The broadcast media production protocol tapes an extensive interview and then condenses the final cut to a series of impact soundbites.

Jeff’s goal was to educate the consumer about the best ways to get a mortgage without getting caught in some of the “tricks of the trade”, but the piece focused solely on the tricks to the exclusion of the educational process. The feel came across tabloidish, which is obviously what consumer oriented On the Money is after. The program was not at all aligned with Jeff’s goal of showing the mortgage industry in a more positive light, and he explains this well in his post-production notes.

Jeff’s goals and character are honorable, and his social media presence allows him to explain his positions more clearly to consumers and mortgage professionals who are following up on the CNBC piece. This is the power of social media as an antidote to the soundbite agenda of mass media programming – the conversation is extended across a wider audience. Compare this to a few years ago, when misaligned messages are tragically hung out to dry and calcify in the minds of its viewers.