MORE NEW MEDIA

Take Back The News is going live as a new place for citizen journalists to, well, take back the news.

Take Back the News allows readers to forward news they consider important (including original journalism), write opinions, participate in forums, take part in polls, and more. Part of Take Back the News appears to be doing is aggregation, another part of it is providing a platform for reader/participants to keep underreported stories alive.

There's not much there at the moment, but it will be interesting to see whether this develops as an essential site for keeping an eye on the world.

TECHNORATI TAG: NEW MEDIA | SOURCE: UNMEDIATED
2:11:15 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

PAID CONCERNS

Leonard Witt wonders what happens to bloggers when content they rely on disappears from free public access. Witt, the erudite blogger at Public Journalism Net, writes:

Witt's musings were touched off by a much-cited Atlantic magazine article on "massless media," which was available either in print or to online subscribers. What he writes about is already a minor problem for those of use who try to keep a conversation on an issue (such as media) going. I hesitate to point to the Wall Street Journal, for instance, because you'll need a subsrciption to go read the articles.

Much of my local daily (the Vancouver Sun) and one of Canada's two national newspaper (The National Post) is already behind subscription firewalls, and the other national newspaper, The Globe & Mail, has "protected" some of its content. As readership continues to fall and advertising income drops, newspapers are increasingly looking at ways to keep making money from one of their on-line operations.

That will have an effect, but it may be offset by the emergence of new media, with new business models that don't rely on subscriber-only access. Because mainstream media has been so slow to react to the internet age, and because it has based so much of what it has done on old media business terms, by the time they arrive online in a big way, already established "alternate" media may make the subscription-only access question moot.
1:54:35 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

A FAIRNESS STANDARD

I read Mary Hodder's post Objectivity vs. Fairness in News Media twice before it hit me that she's on to something.

Traditionally, journalists speak about objectivity and, when they admit that's not possible, balance, which is a tricky concept. Approaching a story with the idea of providing balance tends, at the very basic level, to create he-said, she-said journalism.

Fairness, as Hodder suggests, may be a better standard to hold journalists to, whether they are writing straight news or opinion. Fairness allows for an analytical dimension to reporting that objectivity and balance do not. And if there is an evident fairness to what a reporter (or blogger) is writing, it erases a lot of the unease that erupts when "objective" writers turn to opinion.

(I'm not sure why I didn't see this earlier: one aspect of law and journalism is the concept of privilege, which allows for protection against defamation, under some narrow conditions, provided the coverage is "fair and accurate.")

I've got some more thinking to do on this, but I like the concept and there seems to be a rightness to it. Comments to help me with the "thinking process" are more than welcome.

ALSO: While you're visiting Hodder's site, check out her thoughts on Technorati tags.

TECHNORATI TAG: REPORTER INTEGRITY
11:12:21 AM  LINK TO THIS POST