What’s the future? We don’t know
I’ve been a very bad media blogger lately — lots of things happening that are worth blogging about, but not enough time to mention them all. So here are some short bits, courtesy of my del.icio.us bookmarks (I’m user mathewi if you want to tag something for me) and my Google Reader shared items:
– From TV Week and the New York Times come virtually identical comments from TV executives and newspaper executives about how they don’t know where things are going: “What we’re trying to do is be very clear about something that is not clear. We really don’t know what the consumer really wants,” said the head of Fox Networks Group. And Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Co., told a conference when asked what the future held for his industry: “the only honest answer to that question is, I don’t know.”
– Michael Tippett, who runs Vancouver-based social media site NowPublic.com, wrote something about how he dislikes the term “citizen journalism” (I found this on J.D. Lasica’s site but haven’t been able to find on Michael’s blog):
When you build a bookshelf you don’t think of yourself as a citizen carpenter - you just need a place to put your books. The same is true for news. When I tell a friend about something I saw while walking to work I don’t imagine myself sitting in front of a teleprompter. I am telling a story because I want to express myself… Sharing your photos, videos, stories and reading lists are natural impulses. Journalism has nothing to do with it.
– High Road Communications and iStudio in Toronto (sister companies that are part of PR agency Fleishman-Hillard) recently released what some are calling a “social news release” (more from Tony Hung on that idea here). It’s for Weblo, the virtual world where you can buy virtual versions of real places, and it includes links to save the release on delicious, to submit it to Digg, to subscribe to a feed, and some additional links to related video clips and other info. Brandy Fleming from iStudio wrote about it here and Ed Lee wrote about it here.
– from journalism instructor Mark Hamilton’s blog comes a couple of interesting links: Alan Mutter, who writes a blog called Newsosaur, has a long but worthwhile piece about why a 24-hour news desk is a very bad idea for newspapers (contrary opinions here and here), and Leonard Witt of PJNet has a post about how news organizations that are trying to adapt and survive have to decide whether they are going to use the Internet to “smarten up or dumb down” their coverage.
– Scoopt, a service that sells photos taken by “citizen journalists,” wants people who use Flickr to share their photos to tag them with the keyword “Scoopt” and let the agency try to sell some of their shots. This comes just days after Yahoo and Reuters announced an arrangement to let individuals submit newsworthy photos through a service called YouWitnessNews.
– Online journalism veteran Steve Yelvington says that it’s not about the journalism, but the conversation:
I think the real problem is that journalists (and journalism professors) keep pounding a square peg into a round hole and then complaining about the fit. People in general are not clamoring to become amateur journalists… People want to participate in a community conversation. We can build a separate and new business model around facilitation of that online conversation.
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(On Dec 7th, 2006 at 4:03 pm)
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