The Play Ethic: The Next Journalism (2): the citizen as co-journalist, & the j... - The Diigo Meta page

• 17 Nov 09
  

  Sohail Sangi

  cojournalist citizenjournalism citizen_journalism journalism

• 19 Mar 09
  

  Michel Bauwens

  excellent review by Pat Kane of a series of recent contributions on the end of newspapers debate

  P2P-Journalism P2P

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  Laura Lo Forti

  cojournalist citizenjournalism citizen_journalism journalism

• 18 Mar 09
  

  Howard Rheingold

  
  
  Burning_newspapers Yesterday I sat down to ingest a pile of recent analyses of the imminent 'end of the newspaper' (see list at the bottom of this post). As I said in my Monday post, apart from my night job, I'm an ex-editor and occasional journalist; and I wanted to take a day or two to get my head round the fate of my old business. It's been clarifying for me - hope it's useful for you.

  comm217 journalism

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    Yesterday I sat down to ingest a pile of recent analyses of the imminent 'end of the newspaper' (see list at the bottom of this post). As I said in my Monday post, apart from my night job, I'm an ex-editor and occasional journalist; and I wanted to take a day or two to get my head round the fate of my old business. It's been clarifying for me - hope it's useful for you.

  • 1) How particular the old, 20th century business model was. Paul Starr's calm and comprehensive piece in the New Republic makes it clear that when a commercial newspaper provided a 'public good' - for example, accurate and investigative reportage on the doings of those with power and money, or foreign reporting, or detailed arts coverage - it could do so because it had a strong claim on the majority of classified ads in its locality.
  • 10 more annotations...
  • • Nowadays the internet (as well as the rest of our exploding media-verse) is a much more powerful intermediary between advertisers and consumers than the old newspaper:
    • As Clay's piece says, some newspapers had seen the writing on the wall for ages.
    • 2) Company structure is still so important. Too many of these articles cite the Guardian Media Group as a possible model to follow - not just for their enthusiastic, long-term embrace of digital media, but also because of their status as a trust (the Scott Trust), which insulates them from shareholder-driven, quarterly-report-style performance pressures. Yet as we all know, the Guardian and Observer are loss-making operations, which get cross-subsidized from other GMG media properties
    • ) It's not clear how much people value news anymore. Paul Starr cites some interesting research into the impact of cable and satellite channels on news values. They seem to have caused a real polarisation - with some audiences rushing away from news altogether, into the arms of permanent entertainment; and some rushing towards the constant streams of dedicated news channels. As Starr puts it, we are increasingly dividing into "news-dropouts" and "news-junkies".

    • Starr also calls out to philanthropists, asking them to put some of their civically-minded money into online investigative operations - Propublica being the obvious poster-child for this.

    • Another development Benkler urges us to note are the "new, volunteer-driven party presses"
    • The most fascinating signs of the future comes from what Benkler calls "newly effective nonprofits" - examples like the Sunlight Foundation,
    • It makes me wonder whether there's a sweet spot here for newspaper operations that can hold their nerve in this crisis.  Could they design their investigations in an open-source, Wikipedian way, inviting mass participation in the process, and as a result showing advertisers that there can be online enthusiasm for this kind of editorial?
    • 4) There might be a solution in device-meets-retail. But there's probably not much time left on that one. Shirky makes a great point about the difference between an iTunes for news (Walter Issacson's pitch) and an iTunes for music - which is that when people buy an Arcade Fire track (or hey! a Hue And Cry track!), they want to listen to it over and over again.

    • 
      I don't think this physical, personal dimension of the news-reading experience should be underestimated. The rise of mobile computing (and wifi'd public or consumer spaces) is surely driven by a popular desire not be trapped in the cubicle posture - we want to be out and about in the streets, trailing our invisible digital communities with us, enjoying the gritty, fleshy propinquities of the town centre or city.

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