Mr.
Matt
Spangler

Sustaining Journalism in the Digital Age (Council on Foreign Relations)

via shaneguiter:

Sustaining Journalism in the Digital Age (Audio) - Council on Foreign Relations

Speakers:

• Bill Nichols, Managing Editor, POLITICO
• Vijay Ravindran, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, Washington Post Company
• Vivian Schiller, President and CEO, NPR

 Presider:

• Alberto Ibargüen, President and CEO, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; Chairman, Board of Trustees, Newseum

In Which the HuffPo Business Model is Revealed as a For-Profit Tumblr

Nothing new here. People will continue to do stuff for free for exposure.  It does say something for the quality of said posts, which sit side-by-side with “journalist” counterparts at Huffpo but clearly bloggers (who like myself are doing it when they can depending upon how busy they get with regular work schedules) don’t adhere to the same quality of fact checking, research etc.

via newsweek:

Here’s Arianna Huffington in an interview with Evan Smith (thanks, Nieman Lab!) on what the unpaid people who write for the Huffington Post get out of the deal. Apparently, HuffPo’s strategy is to monetize the fact that most of their writers have never heard of Tumblr: 

We pay them in visibility. We pay them in that we provide the infrastructure, the community, the civil environment into which their work appears. The traffic. And then also the fact that many in the media have the site bookmarked means that they’re going to be seen, not just by many people, but many of the people they may want to reach to go on TV, to get a book contract. We love it. We all love it on the site when we get a call from an agent saying “Can you get us in touch with so-and-so blogger?” In many ways, it becomes like an addition platform.

Writer vs. Writer

Priced to Sell is a pretty outstanding rebuttal to Chris Anderson’s book Free.  After being skewered by Malcolm Gladwell, Anderson’s book comes off as pithy, without a legitimate thesis, and all together not worth the paper its printed on.

Count this round for Gladwell. I’d like to see if Anderson has a response.

New Journalism in Iran

via soupsoup (via winstonwolfe)

An anonymous reader on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish

“Reading your blog over the past 30 something hours makes me realize why the mainstream media is really finished. I mean, this point has finally hit home. You are blogging real time events, with descriptions, evaluation, analysis, and eye witness accounts. You are gathering information from a myriad of sources and putting it out there for a cohesive message. CNN, NY Times, et al are merely running an article about “thousands” of protesters. Its a canned message from just a few stale sources. The revolution is definitely on in Iran. And its on in American journalism too.”

Its hard not to agree with this, especially when looking at the recent coverage of the Iran election.  I’ve been amazed at the amount of Tumblr images flying across my follow dashboard and while there are certainly media people in that group, there are no “journalists”.  Each is reposting a story and spreading the word based on an emotional reaction to an image they see.  They see batons and they see blood.  Most don’t even know what or why the fighting is about, who is the bloodied and what the reason they were bloodied was. Still, when you sit on the side of the fence where you are aghast at the violence and shocked at the images…you push it around, you Twitter in opposition and you call the traditional outlets dead and idiotic.

Arguably if you boiled everything else down to its most basic elements, you might find that this is the reason that the New York Times is struggling and fear mongers like Fox News seem to report good earnings.  Fast and sexy schlock sells.  The New York Times probably has stuck to their guns a bit too long, keep expensive passionate writers who take their time to cover stories, and fact check and make sure they have it right before publishing it. As everyone knows…time costs money…and good journalism takes time.

Don’t we need a mix of “new” and “old”?  One of the things that made Obama’s speech to the middle east recently so powerful was that we now have a President who doesn’t make rash decisions.  He is reasoned. He looks at both sides. He looks at the facts. He is open minded and ready for dialogue…and then he makes a sound, distinct decision.

Taking this hot topic off the table, and supplanting it with another, perhaps the Duke Lacrosse case.  Would the fact that the kids were totally cleared get the same amount of Twitters,  Tumblrs and blog postings after the two month trial where they discovered the girl was lying?  In the Iran case, I think its pretty clear that there is stuff here that needs to be shown now…but you see the folly if you apply this thought process to every story and the entire idea of journalism.

One of my favorite quotes ever was by Michael Irvin, after he was effectively tried in the media for an allegation of cocaine, and then when he was totally cleared weeks later with absolutely no connection he yelled at reporters, “Print the truth as big as you did the lie!”

As with most arguments about “new” online journalism it starts to look shaky when you analyze it in relation to a general reporting methodology. The big challenge is the reporting vs the opinion. New journalism, citizen journalism of this nature, must be leveraged by traditional media outlets to gather the facts, add them to the pool of consideration and analysis to help us make better decisions.  If we have the information lets use it.  I think the Times knows this and they are pushing their New Media team to open up the channels for shared open source information.

Then the intelligent reasoned individuals with a sense of both sides of the argument - arguably in my vision, the Pulitzer winning writers and opinion leaders at the New York Times - can look at all sides and help shape the reactions of our nation.

And then if terror, and lies and deception are the fact…then we act.