Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Journalism's future: maintain the profession, replace the platform
Change is good. Previously I blogged about my thoughts on the future of the print and broadcast industries, and have since gotten feedback wondering about my stance on how current mainstream media (MSM) holds up against emerging technologies and new media applications. It's strange, people seem to think, that a guy in traditional news media would be so passionate in decrying the doom of the very industry paying his salary.
Yeah, I get that a lot.
Rob from Podcast 411 interviewed me and said afterward that I'm the first MSM person he's met that supports - much less professionally acknowledges - new media products as legitimate communications platforms. This blew me away. The wayI see it, I've got to embrace applications affecting my company's core competency, lest they become the source of my annihilation.
I realize not all my colleagues know of new platforms on which to market their wares (and fewer are the number that endorse them), and this is where the greatest tragedy lies, I think. People often naively think I've got a bone to pick with the newspaper industry and that like many in the TV/radio/web industry, I take potshots at what I view as an inferior platform. Not true.
I have a great deal of respect, admiration and love for great journalism. I continue to read, watch and listen to great works. We're always going to depend on the savvy reporting skills of trained professionals, we'll continue to rely on the polemicality of editorialist who writes intentionally to incite emotion, and we'll always demand the thoughts and insight of the world's truly great thinkers. I loathe not the people that drive the amazing content that makes up the world's information, but the shortcomings of the platforms on which it's distributed. The only exception I take are MSM hard-asses who are too blindly loyal to their base media to try anything new.
Someday TV will become passe, too. Print's been dying for years, radio's already in the toilet and the tube is next on the chopping block. So do the right thing and continue to support the efforts of journalism, but likewise encourage the evolution of new ways to compose, distribute, share and refine information.
Yeah, I get that a lot.
Rob from Podcast 411 interviewed me and said afterward that I'm the first MSM person he's met that supports - much less professionally acknowledges - new media products as legitimate communications platforms. This blew me away. The wayI see it, I've got to embrace applications affecting my company's core competency, lest they become the source of my annihilation.
I realize not all my colleagues know of new platforms on which to market their wares (and fewer are the number that endorse them), and this is where the greatest tragedy lies, I think. People often naively think I've got a bone to pick with the newspaper industry and that like many in the TV/radio/web industry, I take potshots at what I view as an inferior platform. Not true.
I have a great deal of respect, admiration and love for great journalism. I continue to read, watch and listen to great works. We're always going to depend on the savvy reporting skills of trained professionals, we'll continue to rely on the polemicality of editorialist who writes intentionally to incite emotion, and we'll always demand the thoughts and insight of the world's truly great thinkers. I loathe not the people that drive the amazing content that makes up the world's information, but the shortcomings of the platforms on which it's distributed. The only exception I take are MSM hard-asses who are too blindly loyal to their base media to try anything new.
Someday TV will become passe, too. Print's been dying for years, radio's already in the toilet and the tube is next on the chopping block. So do the right thing and continue to support the efforts of journalism, but likewise encourage the evolution of new ways to compose, distribute, share and refine information.
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Interesting article on obstacles ahead for journalism, for both mass and new media:
Journalists, whether they work in mass or new media, still tend to believe that traditional journalism and its packaging are as correct in a new medium as those once were in the mass medium. It is as an article of faith within their secular trade.
Yet, traditional journalism and its packaging have demonstrably failed in the mass medium, and there’s abundant evidence that that those are failing the new medium, too...
So, why is most online journalism shovelware from traditional print, traditional video, and traditional radio?
Journalists, whether they work in mass or new media, still tend to believe that traditional journalism and its packaging are as correct in a new medium as those once were in the mass medium. It is as an article of faith within their secular trade.
Yet, traditional journalism and its packaging have demonstrably failed in the mass medium, and there’s abundant evidence that that those are failing the new medium, too...
So, why is most online journalism shovelware from traditional print, traditional video, and traditional radio?
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