Media
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Shooting War
Just published, graphic novel Shooting War by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman: it’s 2011 and anti-corporate blogger Jimmy Burns is working as an embed for Global News – ‘Your home for 24-hour terror coverage’ – in President McCain’s Iraq. And boom. The beta online version is available here. . >>>
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Net Costs
… conned by the numbers from their web departments and aided and abetted by laughably inconsistent web metrics… newspaper owners will strip newspapers of the resources they need to reinvent themselves in order to nurture an internet beast that they believe is a rottweiler puppy but is, in fact, a fully grown poodle. They are barking mad. – John Duncan, former managing editor of the Observer, 1999 to 2005, Press Gazette >>>
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Virginia Tech @ The Social Web
The public spaces on the internet served as the most important arena for exchange of information on the events yesterday. Almost every news story cited a Facebook or Myspace page or a livejournal entry as a source. The Wikipedia entry and discussion on the event hashed out validity of sources and the semantics of tragedy. And then the jarring cell phone footage on Liveleak was among the realest indicators that this gruesome event had actually happened. The events as documented on the social web became the authority. … These past two days have made it ever so much more apparent… >>>
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Sign of the Times
Spot the change in the new logo at the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE ): Before And After Yep, “newspaper” is so 20th Century. ASNE president Dave Zeeck thinks ASME may eventually drop “newspaper” altogether for something more up to date. – Strupp’s Notebook >>>
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Cookie-Cutter Journalism
Flip away from the enthusiasms of the Web 2.0/participatory media crowd; the future suddenly loses its shine. In a paper published last year by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, Robert G Picard gives a detailed account of what’s gone wrong with American news journalism: Many of the challenges of news organization today exist because the professionalism of journalism and journalism education have determined the values and value of the news, commoditized the product, and turned most journalists into relatively interchangeable information factory workers. Average journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask… >>>
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Hail the New Democracy?
Avoid any easy hype about the potential of the internet to usher in a new age of democracy, warns Jackie Ashley. Murdoch and the better-off are mapping their monopolistic powers over to the new digital medium while the old medium’s powers to question these elites are being sidelined: We should be nervous when politicians start boasting, as they are, that the net allows them to bypass irritatingly persistent, difficult interviewers such as John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman. Obviously, they need to be scrutinised and cross-questioned by well-briefed interrogators, secure enough in their jobs to push the point. Democracy demands it.… >>>
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Journalists, Generalists
We’ve spent a lot of time, post-Enron, criticizing the flaws in the investment community’s gatekeeping activities. But I think we should also recognize what the Enron case tells us about the value of newspaper journalism. Maybe, in other words, we have underestimated the value of impartial, professionally-motivated, under-paid and overworked generalists in tackling the kind of information-rich, analysis-dependent “mysteries” that the modern world throws at us. All of which, of course, points out the irony of what’s happening in the newspaper business right now. We are dismantling the institution of newspaper journalism precisely at the moment when it seems to… >>>
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Blogs v Newspapers
Millions of websites will aggregate what we do, syndicate it, link it, comment on it, sneer at it, mash it, trash it, monetise it, praise it and attempt to discredit it – in some cases all at once. But no-one will actually go to the risk and the expense of setting up a global network of people whose only aim in their professional lives is to find things out, establish if they’re true, and write about them quickly, accurately and comprehensibly. The blogosphere, which is frequently parasitical on the mainstream media it so remorselessly critiques, can’t ever hope to replicate… >>>
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When News Meets PR
From the department of kicking the US mainstream media while it’s already down: it’s not unusual for US TV stations to run corporate product pitches as straight news items, according to a new report by a media watchdog. Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy found 77 TV stations guilty of airing video news releases (VNRs) created by PR companies for corporate clients. – Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed What happens is that the news anchor stops talking about murder and mayhem on Main Street and cuts to a colleague who talks about a great new… >>>
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Harmful If Swallowed
Yeah, the Kool-Aid does taste funny. Molly Ivins tears into the assumption that the newspaper business is dying because it isn’t delivering profits. Sure, there’s a steady decline in the industry over the long term. But profits are still happening. What’s killing newspapers is a mania for profits at any cost. Cut reporters and the space devoted to news. Profits will certainly go up. But then newspapers will certainly die. Which wouldn’t matter if newspapers weren’t fundamental to the creation of a well-informed citizenry. Yeah, but – isn’t the growth of the blogosphere making up for this? And acting as… >>>