Author Archives: Steve Mays
Online future of journalism?
Here's what Mindy McAdams foresees:
- Breaking news will be online before it’s on television.
- Breaking news — especially disasters and attacks in the middle of a city — will be covered first by non-journalists.
- The non-journalists will continue providing new information even after the trained journalists arrive on the scene.
- Cell phones will be the primary reporting tool at first, and possibly for hours.
- Cell phones that can use a wireless Internet connection in addition to a cellular phone network are a more versatile reporting tool than a phone alone.
- Still photos, transmitted by citizens on the ground, will tell more than most videos.
- The right video will get so many views, your servers might crash (I’m not aware of this happening with any videos from Mumbai).
- Live streaming video becomes a user magnet during a crisis. (CNN.com Live: 1.4 million views as of 11:30 a.m. EST today, according to Beet.tv.)
- Your print reporters need to know how to dictate over the phone. If they can get a line to the newsroom, it might be necessary.
- Your Web team must be prepared for this kind of crisis reporting.
She concludes by wondering "…whether the mainstream media are superfluous in these situations — or can they perform a useful service to the public by sifting and filtering the incoming reports from the center of the events?"
I hope Ms. McAdams will forgive my reposting here. She, like Seth Godin, is a blogger who deserves not to be edited or excerpted.
Bruce Sterling’s Distraction
If you’re looking for an interesting read over the long weekend, may I suggest Distraction, by Bruce Sterling. I read this book in October of 2004, long before my political awakening. Here’s a short review on Boing Boing:
Distraction is the story of an America on the skids: economy in tatters, dollar collapsed, unemployment spiked, population on the move in great, restless herds bound together with networks and bootleg phones. The action revolves around Oscar Valparaiso, a one-of-a-kind political operator who has just put his man — a billionaire sustainable architecture freak — into the Senate and is looking for some downtime. But a funny thing happens on the way to the R&R: Oscar and his “krewe” (the feudal entourage who trail after him, looking after his clothes, research, security, systems and so on) end up embroiled in a complex piece of political theater, a media war between the rogue governor of the drowned state of Louisiana, the Air Force, the newly elected president, and a weird, pork-barrel science park in its own glassed-in dome.
I’d love to know how many books and screenplays about the 2008 campaign are in the works.
People with news, and people who want news
Those are two points of view examined in a recent post by Dave Winer.
“If the people with the news can publish it themselves, and they can; what’s to stop the people who want the news from reading it directly.”
Which puts me in mind of High Street Beat, a blog written by the mayor of Jefferson City. Ultimately, his readers get to decide if what he writes is “fair and honest,” but he can speak directly to them, as well as through MSM.
“When professional news people consider the Internet they think of it replacing them. Not so. It reduces their role to a bare minimum, makes them less necessary. I still want soundbites from the sources, but I want them to link to the full blog post behind the quote.”
“If reporters are to remain relevant they have to recast themselves, more humbly. Don’t think about “deputizing” us to do what you do. Instead think of the value of your rolodex, your sources. Cultivate and develop that rolodex. To the extent that you know who to call when a bit of news breaks, that’s the extent of your value in the new world, the one we live in now.”
Most of the reporters I’ve known and worked with work very hard. For not much money. But more than a few of them have viewed the companies they work for a the necessary infrastructure that makes it possible for them to report the news.
While the people running those companies viewed the newsrooms as a cog –a BIG cog, but a cog– in a machine whose purpose was to turn a profit. A classic dog and tail situation.
I’m reminded of that classic scene in Network where Arthur Jensen explains things to Howard Beale:
Jensen: The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr.Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality –one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.
Howard: (humble whisper) Why me?
Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
One thing, not the only thing, but one important thing that has distinguished reporters from their readers/viewers/listeners is the reporters had a platform or medium from which to report. That distinction has blurred, if not disappeared.
Scott Adams: Recession
“No one wants the economy to crumble. But having a reason to love your neighbor a little better doesn’t suck. If we can feed everyone – and I think we can – things will be fine. And as I have said here before, some kid in a garage has already figured a way out of this.”
–Scott Adams Blog