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Media Sources / Political Journalism / Social Media / US Press — Comments Off on Shallowness, truthiness and keeping calm
01
Jun 11

Shallowness, truthiness and keeping calm

Sometimes you just miss things and have to catch up. This piece, by James Fallows of the Atlantic, on “learning to love the (shallow, unreliable, divisive) new media” has been out for about six weeks.

But I only remembered it while conducting an archaeological dig in my inbox. Then I realised that I hadn’t read it properly. It’s an effective antidote to endlessly gloomy prognostications about the future of news media and journalism. Among other things, Fallows reminds us that prescriptions for journalism which ignore what people actually want to read about are little use (have a look at the ideas of Gawker’s founder for bringing down totalitarian regimes by beaming gossip in from offshore), that journalism frequently lurches between respectable and populist eras and that platforms for journalism are regularly upset and re-invented.

I hope to return to truthiness, Eli Pariser’s filter bubble and public reason before long. But I’m still trying to work out what I think.

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GB Reviews — 3 Comments
19
Jul 10

Taking a (little) brick out of the paywall

The past few days brought not one but two collisions with the paywall at The Times (for the first of these see post immediately below). On Saturday, the paper printed a short review they’d commissioned of Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus in the Weekend Review section.

Shirky is the subject of occasional mentions and links in this blog and I’d have liked to link to my review. I can provide it here but of course you have to subscribe to The Times to read it. As an experiment, I’ve pasted the text I filed to The Times at the foot of this post. You can read it for free as long as The Times doesn’t object.

Let’s be clear why I doing this test. I’m not against charging for editorial content, just as I’m not against paying cash for a printed paper. Copyright belongs to the paper since the review was commissioned and submitted normally.

I’m trying to underline two connected points about paywalls. The Times (disclosure: I worked for the paper until last year) now operates what I call an “extreme paywall”: the charge applies to everything except the front page. Behind the barrier sit millions of fragments of information, ranging from the important to the specialist to the insignificant. A newspaper website is simultaneously a rolling news site  and a huge data mountain, an encyclopaedia of current affairs, frequently updated.

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Experiments / Ideas / Predictions — 1 Comment
18
May 10

Is the future…possibly…bright?

The future for printed daily papers has looked gloomy for so long that people have forgotten what sunlight looks like. I’ve seen a cluster of pieces in the last few days which stare into the future and they share two striking characteristics: they are more optimistic than pessimistic (about news publishing if not about print) and they see a role for something definable called journalism.

If you only have time to look at one of these, read James Fallows on Google and journalism. The history of news media shows that journalism is always being turned upside down and Fallows talked to the top Googlies about how they see the latest revolution.

To whet your appetite here are two short passages to illustrate why this piece is upbeat and required reading. Google-bashing is daft: the Google thinkers may not be right about everything but they are smart enough to be worth arguing with. Fallows noted that people in Google are finding it easier to think about how to sustain journalism because they are not in the newspapers business. He illustrates it like this:

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