>On Tue, 17 Mar 2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> > Today's argument is over the future of journalism (the thing worth
>> > defending, newspapers only being a medium) in an environment in
>> > which the flawed, but still useful print giants are shrinking at
>> > a startling rate of speed.
>>Yup. What annoys me, though, is the line that we don't need newspapers
>>because the Internet will save us.
>
>I'm totally with you on this. I think one thing that skews the debate
>though is the constant emphasis in these debates on local papers and local
>news. Most local coverage stinks, and maybe I'm wrong, but sometimes I
>think I can imagine a future where the internet provided better local
>coverage on an amateur basis. To me it seems like it's in national and
>international news -- which costs lots of money, and requires professional
>skills -- where professional journalism seems indispensable.
>
>Michael
truly? I haven't read a newspaper -- print -- on a daily basis since last summer. we moved and the old resident still had a sub, so they continued delivering. Instead of sitting on the porch drinking joe and reading a book, I read the paper. I liked it an' all. It did give me better access to local happenings and, mostly, what I liked was the nostalgia. My dad was the chief paperboy for a small town newspaper, so I grew up around the newspaper business. I can remember the editor letting me come upstairs where they'd set type, and I can remember peering into a huge window where you could watch the press run. I worked as an inserter and paperboy for 4 years and I can still smell the ink and almost recall the feeling that would be in the air when they fired up the press and that huge machine would roll.
but i haven't subscribed to a paper for years -- mostly from lack of funds to do so. and when i've subbed to the Sun NYT or pick up the local Sun paper it's inevitable that I just don't have the time to do it justice. Gone, for me, are the days that I remember spending with my parents, lounged out in various places in the house reading the Sunday papers. Since dad was in the business and there were partnerships among papers for delivery, we go the local papers, the paper for the next "big city" and the Sunday NYT.
Even though I get most of my news online these days, I agree with Michael. And I agree with Doug. It's not so much that I care about the medium -- the physical feel of the paper, the smell of the ink, etc. It is, rather, that I can't get into Clay Shirky's thesis in _Here Comes Everybody_.
*cringe* please Carrol. I couldn't help myself. At the bookstore this weekend, I saw the book. I've been waiting for the paperback version, so I'm reading it on the bus and at work since it's way more easy to read in those venues than is Postone. Plus, if I sneak a peak during official work hours, it's justified as work-related. Boss man was even pleased to see it on my desk. Can't say that he'd even grok the title, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. *grin*
Anyway, Shirky's just freaking annoying. In part, this is because he writes, how to say this?, in a vacuum? I'm a sociologist by training and he never once references the fact that the language he uses (groups, communities, collective action) is controversial: there are debates over what the terms groups, communities, collective action, and etc. mean. He seems completely unaware of a mass of literature on this and other topics (such as communications studies, group dynamics, etc.) And maybe he's not. His online writing has referenced various researchers and theoretical treatises. So maybe he's just doing the thing that Ehrenreich has to do writing for a popular audience: footnoting at the end. But I looked: the footnotes aren't pointing to many other texts.
And then the things he says are just too rah rah siss boom bah.
We won't have journalists anymore, we'll have "media outlets". He doesn't call bloggers, etc. journalists, no. rather, everyone in the western world is (or can easily be) a media outlet. He's aware that most of these folks simply repurpose the work of the MSM, sure. But he thinks, and Dwayne's said the same, that what you'll have is a few folks who'll lend their expertise to analyzing that news.
AT one point, he mentions Boing Boing as an example. *choke* *splutter*.
Look: Boing Boing seems to me to be nothing more than a stylized version of the MSM -- part of Nick Denton's blog empire. They push product reviews, don't they? Which is fine: gotta make $$
But why in the world is this "revolutionary"? Holee Christ on a Bike.
So far, skimming, I haven't seen any mention of the limitations of scarcity in terms of the freakin' time anyone has to find some of this stuff. Sure, everyone can be a media outlet. Who in the world can read it all? So, you'll end up having your filters anyway, which is no biggie: but again, why in the world is this revolutionary in the sense that it is changing behavior. it's not. It is, perhaps, emphasizing some already existing behaviors, de-emphasizing some. but there's nothing new or revolutionary going on.
Take the stolen sidekick story with which he opens the book. Woman loses sidekick phone in a cab. Tells friend. Friend tells her to put message on the phone so the finder knows there's a reward. They discover that new "owner" is using phone with her email address, sharing photos, etc. Contact person with lost phone. Girl with the phone tells them to FOAD.
Outraged, friend puts up a web page about it and shares with friends. One thing leads to another, gets picked up on digg. More attention. People help the guy in various ways and some even offer to form possee to go get the phone from the girl.
Eventually, the friend gets the cops to treat the incident at a theft issue, instead of a loss issue which is how they initially treated it. Cops interview girl, get some heat, go back and arrest her. Sidekick returned in 10 days.
Shirky thinks this is revolutionary -- an example of mass collective action, blah blah, all of which takes place outside "traditional institutions and organizations."
Except in his summary he leaves out two things that he'd told as part of the story originally: the fact that the story got picked up by the NYT, which published a story shaming the cops into changing their behavior, and other big media outlets, and the cops themselves. All of them are "traditional institutions and organizations."
Now, had they used a possee to go hunt down that girl or maybe inundated her with emails shaming her, *then* it actually would have taken place outside "traditional institutions and organizations."
And even *if* something like this eventually becomes common -- it won't -- what will happen is that "traditional institutions and organizations" will and *are* taking over the internet. He knows this perfectly well from his earlier work on the power laws that govern the internet, blogging especially. IF the MSM's editors filtered the news in the past, then the editors of blogs, etc will do the same. If no one can read it all, then they will rely on other people to do the filtering.
When I said that incidents like the sidekick story won't become common it will be because there will (and is?) so much noise out there, someone sticking up a complaint blog like that won't mean jack. it'll just be another blog reporting on a stolen phone in a cacophony of similar blog posts.
He says something goofy at some point about how, to paraphrase, 'anyone can put up a web page and any one can find it."
uh. yeah.
There will be more 'churn' possibly, a lot more turnover as to who's hot and who's not. But this isn't revolutionary.
And, so far, he's skating around another issue in funny little flips in a suit that would embarrass Will Ferrell's character in Blades of Glory: how is any of this supported. He mentions people doing volunteer work here and there. He mentions bloggers and news filters being subsidized. So far though this seems not to bother him.
I suppose this is why you can download his books for free in the 'tubes huh?