“A lot of experienced news people — whether broadcast or print — feel like they’ve been baited and switched, that they were trained and hired to do one thing but are now being required to do something else. That’s understandable, but it’s also completely irrelevant.”
— Terry Heaton
Lost Remotes Corey Bergman predicts the iPhone (and the apps that will be written for it) will have huge impact on local news and information:
“…the location-aware phone (and similar phones that follow) will become the go-to devices for local information. In fact, I believe local information ultimately will be consumed more on mobile than PCs.”
Where have we been getting our local information? Oh yeah, radio.
“Janet Coats, editor of the Tampa Tribune, sat down in her newsroom to tell the staff about layoffs, reorganizations, new ways of doing business, and harsh realities and an intern named Jessica DaSilva recorded the event with appropriate admiration.
My favorite bomb: “People need to stop looking at TBO.com [the newspaper’s affiliated web site] as an add on to The Tampa Tribune. The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.” — Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine
If this is true for newspapers today, will it be equally true for TV and radio tomorrow? And when that day comes, what will it mean for networks and others who provide programming (content?) for those stations.
“Sure, it would be great if you could hire one single person who could do everything. We call that “computer jesus” — and you need to accept the fact that there really are not many people in the world who can walk on water. – Mindy McAdams on setting up a team for online journalism:
Clyde Bentley, a Missouri School of Journalism professor whoresearches user-generated news, speaking at the Future of Journalism conference at Harvard, June 20-21:
The debate over bloggers’ influence “is over,” he said. “Blogging is a numbers game. It’s there and we’ll just have to deal with it.” Noting that 120,000 new blogs a day dwarf the country’s 1,427 dailies, he said editors should treat the blogosphere like a giant wire service. Bentley said that while consumer demand for content decreases, their demand for content navigation increases. “There will always be a place for the journalist who can craft a story better than anyone else, but there will be a bigger place for the journalist who can help media consumers find the information they want.” — Poynter: Centerpieces
“Here’s the deal with Twitter as it applies to fast-breaking news: All it takes is one person with knowledge of a big-deal news event (in this case, anyone in the NBC building who learned about Russert’s death) to instantly blast it out via Twitter to blow apart any notion you may have of holding back the tide for a few minutes.”
— Steve Outing, E-Media Tidbits
“The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land they were living on–also called their business model–no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to live on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on a new ground, or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.”
Professor Rosen has hit upon a pretty good metaphor. You can read his full piece here.
If I were a young person interested in doing journalism, I’d find a wagon train with a good wagon master (like Ward Bond) and a good scout and get on board.
Writing in Time Magazine, James Poniewozek has an interesting take (The Beltway-Blog Battle) on the passing of Tim Russert.
“…the press lost its most authoritative mass-market journalist, just as it is losing its authority and its mass market.”
The New Meida vs. Old Media argument got tiresome a long time ago, but Mr. Poniewozek offers a fresh take. A few paragraphs to wet your whistle:
“In their original division of labor, the old media broke news while the blogs dispensed opinion. But look at two of the biggest stories of the Democratic primary: Barack Obama’s comments that working-class voters are “bitter” and Bill Clinton’s rope-line rant that a reporter who profiled him was a “scumbag.” Both were broken by a volunteer for the Huffington Post website, Mayhill Fowler.
Traditional reporters were aghast at Fowler’s methods–the Obama meeting was closed to press (she got in as a donor), and Fowler did not identify herself when speaking to Clinton. But mainstream media had no problem treating the scoops as big news; if she had overheard both quotes in the same way but told them to a newspaper instead of publishing them, that would have been considered a coup.
The case against Fowler, in other words, was about process and credentials, not content. If sources stop trusting us, reporters asked, how will we do our jobs? But however sneaky her methods, Fowler’s stories prove that one reason sites like Huffington have an audience is the perception that Establishment journalism has gotten better at serving its powerful sources than its public. Fiascoes like the Iraq-WMD reporting gave many the impression that the old rules mainly protect consultant-cosseted public officials who need protection least.”
[For more on the Mayhill Fowler story, here’s a bit of audio with Arianna Huffington, speaking at Guardian News & Media’s internal Future of Journalism event on 18th June 2008.]
Mr. Poniewozik poses this rather rude question regarding MSM: “…if 3 million people read Drudge and 65,000 read the New Republic, which is mainstream?”
“The Huffington Post is planning to expand into local news across the US, founder Arianna Huffington said last night, beginning with a site edited for the community of Chicago. Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in “dozens of US cities”. The Chicago site will initially be curated by just one editor.” —Guardian.co.uk
I’m a bit bothered by “aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources.” This suggests (to me) that a HuffPo editor in St. Louis, should they expand to that city, would link to stories from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website. Or even our statewide news network, when we do a story with St. Louis relevance.
Which is way the web works, of course. I’m not quite sure what about this plan bothers me. Maybe it’s: What can a single Huffington Post editor provide that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website cannot?
Is it a matter of putting an editor in each of the top 50 markets… have them aggregate stories and links to local news sources… and building an online audience that is smaller while accomplishing all of this at a fraction of the overhead?
Or is it that the people behind the Huffington Post just get the web better than most of the other guys?
I was talking with a co-worker about Lara Logan’s (CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent) recent appearance on The Daily Show. She posed the question, “When was the last time you saw a dead American soldier on TV?” She was making the point that media in the U. S. has been MIA on the war in Iraq (except for that victorious march into Baghdad).
My co-worker’s take was: “The only reason to show a dead American soldier would be to turn someone against the war.”
Or maybe that war is news and death is part of the story?
Actually, I didn’t have a response. I can understand that view coming from W or Rumsfeld (back in the day). But how many citizens feel the same? How many would rather not to see the bloody reality of war on their TV screens?
By this logic, we also shouldn’t be seeing the critically wounded at Walter Reed. Or can we translate missing limbs to a “don’t-let-their-sacrifices-be-in-vain” message?
So I’m asking myself why we saw more dead troops during the Viet Nam war, and it came to me. We had lots of reporters on the front lines in that war. But not so many on the mean streets of Baghdad.
In the old days, you could make a career filing reports from the front lines. Sure, you could shot, but you weren’t likely to wind up the star of a YouTube beheading video.
Naw, American journalism took a pass on this war. Better to let the Brits cover this one.