WHITHER JOURNALISM?Lots of chew over in Evan Cornog's essay Let's blame the reader, at the Columbia Journalism Review.
If there's a problem with the piece, it is that it looks at the problems newspapers are facing without acknowledging the significant shift that is the result of the coming together of legacy media and the internet. From the existing legacy media point of view, the essay is worrisome. It would be interesting to see the same issues examined from the point of view of a media that accepts a new partnership with readers. |
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For those listening to podcasts, NPR's On the Media is available as a weekly download and New York's WFMU (host for The Speakeasy with Dorian, which broadcast the interview with Susan Orlean in late December) has podcasts of seven of its shows, including The Speakeasy, a Donna Summer-hosted music show and more. The station's site also has a pretty good explanation of podcasts and how to subscribe. |
GOING BROADBANDAt I Want Media:
The Future of the New York Times: The distribution of news will shift to broadband within our lifetimes, says Arthur Sulzberger Jr. The New York Times publisher is considering transforming NYTimes.com into a pay site. 8:42:24 PM LINK TO THIS POST |
FAST FLICK'R
Snow hits Vancouver, photographers hit Flick'r. At 4:30 p.m. about 40 different snow shows had been uploaded. |
I'D LIKE TO THANK...I Technorati'ed my blog this afternoon (all us cool kids have moved beyond Googling ourselves) and discovered I've been nominated for a Koufax Award in the best single issue blog category. What's a Koufax award? I looked it up:
The Koufax Awards are named for Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest left handed pitchers of all time. They are intended to honor the best of the left of blogtopia. At its core, the Koufax Awards are meant to be an opportunity to say nice things about your favorite bloggers and to provide a bit of recognition for the folks who provide us with information, insight, and entertainment usually for little or no renumeration (I'm sure they meant remuneration. Slip of the keyboard.). The awards are supposed to be fun for us and fun for you. (The left of blogtopia? Has someone discovered my secret inner socialist? Or is it because I'm Canadian and, you know, we're all kinda pink up this way?) I'm not taking this too seriously expect for two things: someone thought enough about what I'm doing to send in a nomination (thank you, kind stranger) and Sandy Koufax is my all-time favourite baseball player. A final note: if you are looking for some fine, fine people to add to your list of daily reads, go check out the extensive list of nominations, not only in the single issues blog category, but in all the others. There are some amazing bloggers out here, doing some amazing things. Go explore.
NOTE: To avoid any confusion, the nomination is for Notes from a Teacher, not Mark on Media, which is a mirror of Notes From a Teacher that runs on a different server. Although, if they are both essentially the same, does that count as two nominations? |
WHAT'S LEGITIMATE?Not sure if the fine folks at News Designer meant this to come out quite like this. Here's what they wrote...
The lesson would be if there isn't a legitimate "byline" on a piece of journalism than it's likely not legitmate. ...at the end of a post about how a couple of newspapers got stung by a bogus tsunami photo. My first reaction was to wonder who is going to decide what's a "legitimate byline?" What's the standard? Only "real" journalists? Someone you personally know and trust? If I'm an editor and I do that, I'm cutting myself off from a huge pool of information and, now that we're in the age of citizen journalists, a huge pool of eyewitnesses. Media doesn't have to restrict itself to "legitimate bylines." All it has to do is apply two of the standards of the biz: skepticism and fact-checking. OOPS: A note from New Designer:
Mark, Hey, just to clarify, that bit about "legitimate bylines" was a quote from a post a photographer made on a message board. Not necessarily my opinion and all that.
Cool. Post something, get the clarification (about something I should have noticed in the first place), pass it along. The conversation continues. |
ARGGHHH!I can't keep up. In the small corner of the internet that I prowl, there has been an explosion of items I consider important to the conversation about how media is changing. Rather than post individual items and links, here's a lightly annotated list of stuff you should find interesting. Interview: We Media one year later. The We Media report is one of the touchstone documents on participatory journalism. Core point: media has to realize readers want to become involved. We Media is available as a PDF download and well worth reading. The Rise of a New News Network by Om Malik at Business 2.0. Core point: Citizen journalism is here and it's too big to ignore. Convergence of Content, Communication, and Computing by Ramesh Jain at The Broadband Daily. Core point: Convergence of content, communication and computing is creating a powerful new mediascape. (The post concerns video, but the implications are much wider than that.) The future of digital media, an interview with Hank Barry that deals with everything that's happening out there from a business point of view. There's too much there to define a "core point," but this caught my eye: "...some of the people and firms who are at the edge of today's innovations will join more traditional media, and thereby change what 'traditional media' means." Read the whole thing: it's a worthwhile investment of time. Podcasting isn't webcasting by Doc Searls. Core point: Regulatory bodies were able to effectively ward off the threat webcasting posed to established media companies and podcasting may face the same threat. I think that regulatory authority that (seemingly) is in the thrall of the big "content controllers" is one of the biggest threats to the emergence of a vibrant new media. Much of the commentary on this is American, but Canada is not exempt.
(I've had a lot of these open in browser tabs and windows for a couple of days now and have lost contact with my sources for some of them. Sorry for not giving credit where credit is due.) |
COMING OF AGEBig events speed evolutionary change. The mediascape got a push from the hugely tragic tsunami. From Neil McIntosh at the Guardian Unlimited Newsblog:
In short: this wasn't a few political hacks talking to each other. For the first time, powerful coverage of a huge news event was not brought to you purely by established media. An army of "citizen journalists" played a new role, perhaps all the more vital considering the effect vivid reportage, online and off, has had on the subsequent fundraising efforts. It's not that "everyone can be a reporter," it is that so many want to be. A lot of things are coming together here: ubiquitous digital cameras (standalone or in cellphones), access to the internet, "instant" publishing tools and the desire to tell. At the other end: aggregators and individuals who bring together the diverse threads and point to them, including big media (like Guardian Unlimited and scores of others) who get it.
UPDATE: On the same theme. Cyberjournalism.net points to an Asia Times piece that says "tsunami bloggers have forged a "tribal news network." |
SHARING THE LOADThere's a great thread going at Dan Gillmor's site in response to a short post he did defining distributed journalism. Some quotes, the first from Dan:
The potential for distributed journalism to be a key part of tomorrow's news strikes me as immense. We in citizen journalism -- and, if we're smart, in professional journalism -- can focus the energy and knowledge of regular folks, and especially their willingness to do some small amount of legwork to help feed a larger whole, on all kinds of things. And from commenter Josef Imrich:
Like democracy, media is not an exclusive game played by experts such as journalists and their political and business masters; it is an ongoing conversation within and between communities. It is a meeting place for different arguments and perspectives, an arena in which large and small problems are ventilated. It is in a human nature to turn community conversation becoming a monologue ... Let us not be outfoxed by the idea that a handful of rich and powerful characters have a monopoly on truth and what matters in terms of legislation and regulations. The post and comments are a great primer on distributed journalism, which is not a new idea, nor exclusive to journalism, but which has tremendous potential to change the relationship between media and "reader." And that's central to the remaking of media that is underway.
UPDATE: After you've read the piece on distributed journalism, go to the main page of Dan's site and check out a couple more articles, one on the arrogance of Apple and another on a Wal-Mart photography policy. Both will leave you shaking your head. |
Last update: 1/30/05; 10:21:39 PM .
