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The future of news is entrepreneurial
Jeff Jarvis argues just what the title says: News' future will involve journalists becoming entrepreneurs and finding ways to meet the demands of smaller audiences.
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What should government do? Broadband for all. I’d start – and stop – there.
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I wish that the capital that has gone into not-for-profit news ventures in cities across the country had gone instead into creating for-profit enterprises: so we can prove the market, so we can learn how to make news sustainable. That is god’s work.
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News’ Forbidden City
Murdoch and other media leaders are meeting in China. Jeff Jarvis thinks they're a self-appointed group of "leaders" only looking for ideas amongst themselves -- ideas to prop up outdated business models.
Is journalism an industry?
Jarvis argues that declining employment numbers are a poor way to gauge the health of an industry -- journalism -- in the midst of major restructuring.
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the fall news as an industry paralleling the end of the industrial economy. That’s not just about shedding the means of production and distribution now that they are cost burdens rather than barriers to entry. It’s about the decentralization of journalism as an industrial complex, about news no longer being based solely on employment.
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So is employment the measure of news? No. Is it the proper measure for every industry? Not necessarily. Is it the measure of the economy? Not as much as it used to be. Media is becoming the first major post-industry. Others will follow. You just have to know where to look.
A poor craftsman blames others’ tools
Jeff Jarvis criticizes a pair of posts from journalists who find no value in Twitter because, Jarvis says, they fail to see how Twitter can be a tool to improve journalism -- "not just violate its age-old dictates."
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In these screeds, we also get a glimpse of these Journalists’ definitions of journalism. I say that news was made into a product by the necessities and limitations of its means of production and distribution in print and broadcast. News is properly a process, I believe. Cohen says, no, it must have a beginning, middle, and end, a narrative he sets, an order he gives, a chaos he rejects. He says elsewhere in his column that presence is necessary to do journalism; he thus says that it takes a reporter to report, that news without the journalist him or herself bearing witness to it is not real news. He puts The Journalist at the center of news. I say the journalist is the servant of news. I tell my students to add journalistic value to what is already being spread – reporting, fact-checking, perspective, answers – but recognize that the news is there with or without them. It is gathered and spread by the people who see it and need it with new tools, like Twitter. Like it or not.
Politics makes….
Jeff Jarvis reacts to the reaction of Plain Dealer columnist Connie Shultz to Jarvis's earlier criticism of her connection to journalism-related legislation via her senator husband. (Complicated, eh?)
Journalistic narcissism
Journalism has become more about the journalists than about the issues, writes Jeff Jarvis.
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Behold the hubris of that: They decide what is important. Because we can’t. That’s what it says. That’s what they believe.
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The press has become journalism’s curse, not only because it now brings a crushing cost burden but also because it led to all these myths: that we journalists own the news, that we’re necessary to it, that we decide what’s reported and what’s important, that we can package the world for you every day in a box with a bow on it, that what we do is perfect (with rare, we think, exceptions), that the world should come to us to be informed, that we deserve to be paid for this service, that the world needs us.
What’s a medium?
Are all media converging? Does it matter whether you're a print, broadcast or radio journalist anymore?
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They all learn how to gather news and tell stories in audio, video, blogs, live blogs, wikis, Twitter, social tools, and whatever comes next. Of course, they also learn the eternal verities of journalism and techniques of reporting and writing. They are now exposed to the fundamentals of the business of journalism. As they progress through other classes in their subject specialties, they are required to create stories in various media.
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We also watched our students from any track work in any track. And we’re getting better (and still need to get better) at requiring work in many media throughout the program.
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Whack-a-mole with micropayments
Jeff Jarvis takes a whack at micropayments, which are rearing their heads again
Inventions and opportunities lost
Jeff Jarvis praises Jack Shaffer's article in Slate about newspapers' failure to create the kind of Web they wanted. Jarvis notes the early attitudes of "why should we help the Internet" were to blame for newspapers' stubbornness.
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For every honest attempt to change that Shafer and Boczkowski talk about, I saw many more efforts to avoid and even torpedo change: newspaper editors and executives who told me that it was not their job to help this internet thing, to share content with the internet, to link to anyone else on the internet, to interact with readers on the internet, to rethink their procedures because of the internet, to teach new skills because of the internet, to promote the internet, and on and on. I saw too many direct attempts to subvert the future. That’s where the fault lies.
Penny for his thoughts
Jeff Jarvis criticizes David Carr's "iTunes for news" idea by reminding us all of the failure that was Times Select.
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But the real fallacy in Carr’s delusion is that a news story or an opinion, like a song, is unique—that you can’t get it somewhere else and so you have to buy the original.
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And even if Carr had a unique idea here, the essence of it—without guitar accompaniment—can spread without having to hear him sing the tune. Information isn’t art. Neither are opinions.
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The quality of friendship
Jeff Jarvis channels Anna Pickard to show us that the friendships that form on the Internet are long-lasting, smart and sometimes closer than the friendships we form with the people near us.
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Call me naive, but far from being the bottomless repository of oddballs and potential serial killers, the internet is full of lively minded, like-minded engaging people – for the first time in history we’re lucky enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but pinpoint perfect friends by rounding up people with amazingly similar interests, matching politics, senses of humour, passionate feelings about the most infinitesimally tiny hobby communities. The friends I have now might be spread wide, geographically, but I’m closer to them than anyone I went to school with, by about a million miles.
Attention + Influence do not equal Authority
Buzzmachine looks at the notion of sorting Twitter posts by "authority" and finds that the traditional way of thinking about authority (as equated with big-ness) doesn't work online.
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We still measure and value things online according to that scale, even though it is mostly outmoded.
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The press was the filter. And the press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness.
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