My brother and I have been pitching a project to a couple to newspapers. it’s about interactivity and making the value of journalism transparent – a meta project where the end result is still valuable because it’s hard work and doesn’t rely on shouting first but rather articulating a subject well. In the age of borked analogies, good journalism is like a well knit sweater – You might know how it was made and even have the pattern for doing it yourself, but you’d much rather just wear it than bother with the production. (I’m not paid for writing good analogies.)
Above all, good journalism shouldn’t be about springing surprises on the readership. The belief that exclusivity and having a scoop is what makes newspapers relevant is one reason of why the news industry is frantically grasping for straws (We’re on Twitter now!) in hopes of looking hip, while at the same time not allowing the new technology to affect how they fundamentally view their role in society and the function that they fulfill for their readership. (And advertisers)
Clay Shirky has a brilliant quote in one of his posts on the subject:
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
→ Clay Shirky, newspapers and thinking the unthinkable.
Maybe we’ve gotten it ass backwards; Maybe we ought to be going at this as independents and establish our own platform instead of joining an existing one, but there’s so much knowledge amassed in the old journalistic institutions that it would seem a waste to disregard it. Just because the owners and directors can’t make money off of their papers doesn’t make the journalists themselves any less useful or interesting, so it’s disheartening to see where reporting seems to be heading and what lack of confidence journalists have in their own craft.