fundamentals of journalism 2008

Journalism, Technology &

the Web

Reshaping each other and us

I. Journalism

First Estate — Clergy

Second Estate — Nobility

Third Estate — Commoners

Fourth Estate — Popular Presswith its capacity of advocacy and to serve as a check against abuse of power

18th century France

• Observe

• Filter the observed

• Serve as the conscience of society

• Protect the lower castes from the upper castes

• Provide more signal than noise

Roles of Journalism

1. Journalism's first obligation is to the truth

2. Its first loyalty is to citizens

3. Its essence is a discipline of verification

4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover

5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power

6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise

7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant

8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional

9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience

PEJ – Committee of Concerned Journalists

Source: http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles

Today

Fifth Estate — media in opposition to mainstream (Fourth Estate) media.

• non-traditional or emerging media

• bloggers

• alternative media

• citizen journalists

II. Technology

First Internet Connection

Oct. 29. 1969 – Failed after sending “lo” from first message: login

Source: Ray Kurzweil

Intel’s Gordon E. Moore postulated Moore’s Law -- that technology tends to demonstrate a constant, exponential rate of improvement on an annual basis.

Meaning: we can perform the same tasks with technology, doing more with less – smaller, faster, and cheaper.

Every year.

Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired magazine asks "What does technology want?"

His observation that technology’s consistent movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of all living things.

Without an external disruption (large asteroid?), in our current cultural context, we can expect on an ever-increasing role of ever-evolving technology in our daily lives.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evolves.html

III. Web

Communicate

Content

Context

Collaborate

Coordinate

Cooperate

Compete

Community

We collect and communicate

content, coordinating across

many competing online

contexts by collaborating in ad

hoc, cooperative web

communities.

Source: Ray Kurzweil

Change

accelerating incessantly,exponentially

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons-based_peer_production

IV. Observed Effects

PEJ – The State of the News Media 2008

“...the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it. [...]

“The crisis in journalism, [...] may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.”


“News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, Web site or newscast — to becoming a service: how can you help me, even empower me? There is no single or finished news product anymore.”


“A news organization and a news Web site are no longer final destinations.”

“Now they must move toward also being stops along the way, gateways to other places, and a means to drill deeper, all ideas that connect to service rather than product.”


“The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among ‘citizen’ sites and blogs.”

“News people report the most promising parts of citizen input currently are new ideas, sources, comments and to some extent pictures and video.”


“Increasingly, the newsroom is perceived as the more innovative and experimental part of the news industry.”


“The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden.”

“A firm grip on this is difficult but the trends seem inescapable. A comprehensive audit of coverage shows that in 2007, two overriding stories — the war in Iraq and the 2008 campaign — filled more than a quarter of the newshole and seemed to consume much of the media’s energy and resources.”

The State of the News Media 2008

“Madison Avenue, rather than pushing change, appears to be having trouble keeping up with it.”

“New media offer the promise of more detailed knowledge of consumer behavior, but the metrics are still evolving and empirical data have not yet delivered a clear path.”