Todd Suomela's Library tagged media →  View Popular

ince I've examined two theories of blame—it's Bob's fault; it's Washington's fault—and found both to be partly wanting, that leaves another possibility: it's the world's fault. Or, at least, it's the fault of human nature. Sadly, history and science make a compelling case that most of us are, indeed, hard-pressed to give a damn.

In 2005, the psychologists Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic found the limits of human compassion to be even more irrational and constrained. In their study, students at a university in Pennsylvania were paid five dollars to complete questionnaires on technology. Enclosed with the questionnaire was a seemingly unrelated letter soliciting donations to a hunger relief organization in Africa.

The study's first conclusion was what the researchers had expected: people are more compassionate when they are told about a specific victim. When respondents were asked to donate money to help feed a seven-year-old African girl named Rokia, they contributed more than twice what they did when just confronted with general statistics on hunger.

But then things got surprising. When Rokia was presented with the statistics, the donations fell by nearly half. Worse still, when the authors asked one set of subjects to perform mathematical calculations and the other set of subjects to describe their feelings when they heard the word "baby," the subjects who'd done math gave only about half as much to Rokia as the ones who'd thought about babies. Apparently, just thinking analytically makes us stingier. The authors of the study concluded that "calculative thought lessens the appeal of an identifiable victim."

The first paragraph in the selection above is something I was talking about the other day in an interview on this topic. The industrial era, integrated newspaper -- with horoscopes, wedding announcements, politics, sports, comics, movies reviews and restaurant profiles -- is going away. It may have made sense, as a convenience, when papers were delivered to your driveway, or read on the subway. But moving online, that model is rapidly changing.

And who thinks that it makes sense? Are all papers equally good at all sorts of journalism? Do I need the NY Times to have a sports section? Or review movies?

We are seeing the vertical supply chain of newspapers being blown apart into horizontal focus areas. That's why the most interesting journalism start-ups are focused on one area, like politics, sports, or social change.

I am a fan of local news, but that is not the sole focus of big city newspapers. They print car reviews, movie reviews, and stories about pirates in Somalia, none of which are local. They are a blur of things, and no one has ever tried to unblur them, really.

I suggest that what emerges from Shirky's media revolution will be something profoundly unlike big city newspapers, today. They may jettison a lot of what is taken for granted, as well as inventing something that will attract people's attention in this 21st century. It may be television blended with the web in some addictive way, like the Twitter mashups we are seeing on network news shows. But it won't come from newspapers fighting rear guard actions like paywalls.