Friday, March 20, 2009

Another article on "the future of journalism"...

In the vein of my last post, here's an article by Dave Winer at Scripting News.

Here's an excerpt:
In math, when you have to prove a hard theorum, first you try to prove elements of the theory, that if true, would prove the whole thing. In software, you may not know what the final user interface looks like, but you know some layers to it, so in either case you can start work right away. In 1994 we didn't know what the new journalism would look like, and we still don't, but we knew some essential elements, perhaps the essential element -- that sources go direct. It's the thing the Internet does to all intermediaries, it disses them. It happened to travel agents, realtors, classified ads, all kinds of shopping, and it has happened to news too.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Digital Newsroom: On the inside looking out at journalism

Will the members of the audience please stand up?
Thank you, Stephen Johnson, for re-framing the ongoing “death of journalism” discussion from the perspective of the information consumer.

Too often, when poring over that phrase-no-one-can-define, “the future of journalism,” we forget we aren’t just talking about the future of journalists. We are also talking about every single person who at some time in the future will seek out news.

This point has been lost in not only this discussion, but also in my journalism classes. Our classmates and our teachers serve as a proxy for a public audience, but we rarely acknowledge that fact. The audience is an entity that has gotten lost in the blur. It’s undefined. We don’t interact with it. We don’t know what it looks or smells or acts or thinks like.

In a classroom setting, it doesn’t exist.

I think that’s a fundamental flaw in how we are approaching our training to become journalists in a future that we are going to determine.


Who is our audience, and should they be the ones who define the future of journalism? There is no such thing as a passive audience anymore. Image from Flickr user liz_noise chared with a Creative Commons license.

Images of imminent death
I just got back from a lecture by Barbie Zelizer of UPenn’s Annenberg School for Communication. Her talk, “How news images work: When engagement comes at the expense of understanding,” was really about death.

Or, rather, imminent death.

She addressed how newspapers and television stations chose to show “about-to-die images.” That is, images where death is known, implied, or assumed, not explicitly shown. Her discussion was interesting and relevant, but I couldn’t help thinking that in 10 years – or 5, or 2 – she won’t be able to conduct the same analysis.

Consumers of the news will be shown images less and less, but will seek them out, and choose what they want to see. Thus analyzing how images – or facts or stories – are presented won't be as important as analyzing how they are created, shared and interpreted.

Which brings me to another point Zelizer made, which is that images require the people viewing them to use their imaginations. There will always be something left out, something unsaid. I think the question, "how does imagination function in news?" applies to text as well as images. And that's a question that can't be answered without an audience.

How does what we look at shape how we see?
The way we read, see, and process information is changing. Nicholas Carr’s fantastic article in the July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic covers this topic. He writes,
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.
It’s scary. It’s exciting. It’s not well understood. But it stands to reason that if what language we speak influences how we perceive the world, then what language we read might do likewise.

Shirky’s essay and Johnson’s speech are reassuring. Journalism and story telling will continue to exist. Information will continue to proliferate and become more accessible. And, as Johnson said, it will take new skills to navigate the crushing weight of it all.

But no one – not Shirky, not Johnson, and definitely not me – has yet found an answer to the question of how or if journalism, information gathering, story telling, analysis, blogging (or whatever new name it takes) will be profitable or economical. For now, the optimistic view is that a new business model will be found…somewhere.

But I don’t think that’s a given. Maybe no one will find a way to make money from the sharing of information.

And if they don’t?

I’ve been spending a lot of time with a dairy farmer for a story (due at 6 p.m. tomorrow – eek!). He made sure to tell me – twice, actually – that while farmers may seem to complain a lot about the government, the weather, the market, the you-name-it, ultimately being a farmer is a choice. They do it because they love the lifestyle.

From my perspective as a journalism student, I don’t think journalists are any different. We came here – not business school or law school or medical school – for a reason.

Now, what I haven’t figured out yet is whether this will be what saves journalism, or what dooms it. I would be content to toil away doing great, relevant reporting for peanuts (check back on me in 20 years and see if my mind has changed, though). I know that I should be thinking about entrepreneurship and business models, but that’s not my nature.

But maybe, if we start thinking about who our audience will be, then the business and entrepreneurship will follow. Maybe, by thinking about our future readers, we’ll become not only better writers, but better business people, as well.

Maybe, by looking beyond ourselves and beyond our subjects to our audience, we can prevent ourselves from taking our own about-to-die self-portraits.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 03/17/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 03/13/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Mooooo! Raw milk, no-till, and other notes from the farm...


I've had my head stuck far up a dairy cow's butt for the past six weeks or so.

Ok, not really...although I did witness artificial heifer insemination. Twice.

In case you haven't been following along at home, I've been working on a few stories related to the dairy industry. The first was a story on small raw milk producers in Colorado. (I just pitched it to Women's Magazine and they want it -- yay!) Yesterday a story on the NY Times popped up about possible revisions of raw milk laws in Connecticut (one of the few states that allows people to sell raw milk commercially in stores. California is another, and the LA Times recently had a story on the raw milk debate).

Another piece I am working on is a profile of Colorado dairy farmer Jon Erickson. He runs both a 200-cow commercial dairy and a raw milk dairy. It'll be a microcosm profile of how farmers (not just dairy farmers) are looking towards smaller business ventures to supplement the losses incurred by more traditional industrial farming.

Erickson emphasizes that farmers face a lot of complex issues, and often, when you solve one problem, you create another.

Technology itself is a problem, because as farms because more efficient and productive, they also drive market prices down.

Land use is another complex issue. When farmers are ready to retire and -- as increasingly the case -- their kids don't want to go into farming, some of them want to sell their land. But in places like Colorado, which is actively trying to control growth, a lot of that land gets designated as open space. That means that farmers can't sell their land for development, even though they've been there for decades and, some could claim, have that right.

Another issue is migration. Another is water. And yet another is tillage practices.

Erickson says that his father tried reduced tilling practices back in the 70s, when it was new and hip. It's had a resurgence again because of global warming, and its touted ability for carbon capture. But one thing many people didn't bring up about reduced tillage is that it often requires increased herbicide use. Turning the land over less means more weeds grow.

Which brings us to yesterday, and an article in the Christian Science Monitor on organic no-till farming. This practice seems to address the herbicide debate. But Erickson and his father raise another question about it:

What about people who have been using practices like reduced tillage or no tillage for decades? They can't apply for rebates for carbon sequestration because for them it isn't new. Is this fair? Just because they got a jump on what could be considered more "sustainable" (and the idea of "sustainable farming" is a whole discussion or two or ten in itself), does that mean that the government shouldn't reward them for it, like it is people that are just coming to it?

Update! (9:55 am) I also meant to link to this story about the "slow money" movement from NPR's Real Money show. The example of a slow investment they examine is...investing in a dairy farm!!

Image from flickr user karlfrankowski shared with a Creative Commons license.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 03/05/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 03/03/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Portland is a pit of despair

Update, 5:39 ppm: Ok, here is the link to Business Week's "list" (which isn't actually a list at all...). Someone pointed out to me how ironic it is that for a lot of cities, they chose pictures that look like a rockin' good time! Portland has a riverfront festival with happy boat-goers, Cleveland is the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, Louisville has frisky horses, and Memphis has a crazy-funky-fun font! This looks awesome, not miserable. Madison, Wisc., on the other hand, looks dreadful.


Ha HA! Oh, I guess I should explain...

The lead story right now on Oregonlive.com (the poor excuse for a website that the Oregonian has to live with) is "BusinessWeek ranks Portland at top of 'unhappiest cities' list."

This is hilarious because Portland often gets ranked as the best city to live in, the greenest city, and yadda yadda yadda. (Not to mention the New York Times has an ongoing love affair with Portland.)

Personally, I agree with some of the commenters. I think this is an elaborately engineered hoax executed by Portland residents to move the rose-colored spotlight away from Portland and keep people from moving to the city!

Also, I think it is kind of ridiculous that the fact that Portland has 222 cloudy days a year is used as one of the reasons why the city is the "unhappiest." Anyone who grew up in Portland knows that the clouds offer a sense of security and comfort. I'm definitely not any happier here in sunny sunny Boulder than I was in stumptown.

Photo credit: Brent Wojahn/The Oregonian. I love how they picked this photo to run with the story. Ooooh, spooky!