Monday, January 12, 2009

iNventing the new news-media David Carr's "The Media Equation" in The New York Times has an interesting observation about Apple, iTunes and the changes in the music industry: Let's invent an iTunes for News Carr wonders whether something like a large-format iPod and an "iTunes Store" news service could breathe some new economic life into the news industry.  After all, Steve Jobs and the iPod gave the music business an alternative to "illegal file sharing" -- couldn't some equally attractive marriage of hardware and Web services become an electronic newspaper worth paying for? That's a Holy Grail the newspaper industry has been tracking for more than 25 years, including experiments like Knight-Ridder's Viewtron, Roger Fidler's (1981) search for an electronic tablet, and other videotex experiments. Carr mentions Michael Hirschorn's End Times article in the January-February issue of The Atlantic, super-or-subtitled "Can America's paper of record survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism?" Searching it for some optimism, I offer this quote: If 80 percent of The Times staff ends up laid off, many of them won't find their way to new reporting jobs. But over the long run, a world in which journalism is no longer weighed down by the need to fold an omnibus news product into a larger lifestyle-tastic package might turn out to be one in which actual reportage could make the case for why it matters, and why it might even be worth paying for. The best journalists will survive, and eventually thrive. Along with helping "the best journalists" survive, the model or models I'm hoping for would also allow younger journalists to make a living -- thrive, even -- and would keep alive a local, regional and state-level "watchdog press corps" with time to attend public meetings, browse public records, ask public-spirited questions and tell the rest of us what's going on.  I haven't read all the entries in the "I am the future of journalism" contest to see how many of the take that track. I guess this is page is where a lot of this semester's journalism class discussions will begin... (If we get into the history of videotex, we'll use the library to get articles with titles like The social shaping of videotex: How information services for the public have evolved; when we talk about blogs as sources of links and personal insight, we'll look at eye-witness accounts like Dave's, which is where I found the Slate videotex article linked above.) Update: Back to the iTunes model, Rich Gordon at Poynter has a response to the idea, more optimistic about the potential of online advertising as a way to support professional news organizations, if they are willing to make some changes: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&;aid=156833 3:11:52 PM    comment []

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