SUNDAY READING...

...and thinking.

Jay Rosen at PressThink has a list of 20 issues that may help frame the narrative about the rapid change in media. Rosen writes that he came up with the list after he fumbled an interview with a BBC reporter.

During the interview, I was tripping over my words, repeating myself, messing up and starting over, or just talking without making sense. There were no short answers. And there were no good answers. There were lots of confusing and hopelessly abstract answers. It was embarrassing because I'm supposed to be a professional; I've done hundreds of interviews like this. So what happened, just a bad day?

I don't think so.

There's too much happening. The public world is changing faster than we can invent terms for describing it.

Rosen's list covers a range of changes, including issues of trust, transparency and scandal in mainstream media, the emergence of blogging as a potent political force, Jon Stewart, political involvement and more. Rosen writes:

Every one of these things is related to all the others. But there is no over-arching narrative to contain them all. I spend much of the day trying to figure out what the connections are, and how best to phrase them. It's exciting; it's exhausting.

He doesn't have any answers, but he has touched off an interesting debate at the site.

I don't think Rosen is overstating the case that there is "too much reality" to easily deal with. More than enough things have happened this year in mainstream media, politics and on the internet to mark a watershed of some sort. The question that no one can answer is "what happens next?"
6:30:27 PM  LINK TO THIS POST