December 4th, 2009 by ame
Scared of the bear nutcracker... and also by questions about what's going on with journalism.
Many journalists today are making a similar face as the one showcased to the left.
A former boyfriend friend sent me an email last week and asked for my opinions on the journalism industry. He writes:
“How do the dwindling print media companies resurrect themselves… My personal opinion is that there are some working examples of quality news and information sources… I think that people will pay for quality (take magazines like the New Yorker and The Economist). The problem is that the value of the daily news depreciates because new stories are so volatile… I can also see how deeper problems could arise like an information divide between those who can afford quality and the technology and gadgets needed to do so, and those who cannot. Thus leading to a place where the people who could really use some quality informing are less likely to have access to it” – email submission
I responded with a quote from Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte (Director of MIT’s Media Lab) which was published in 1995.
“Another way to look at a newspaper – and that is as an interface to the news. Instead of reading what other people think is news and what other people justify as worthy of the space it takes, being digital will change the economic modl of news selections, and make your interests play a bigger role, and, in fact use pieces from the cutting room floor that did not make the cut on popular demand.
You might be willing to pay the Boston Globe a lot more for ten pages than for a hundred pages if you could be confident that it was delivering you the right subset of information.”
- Negroponte, Being Digital. 1995.
Personally, I would pay $ for a service that delivered me the news that I was looking for, so I wouldn’t have to spend as much time digging through all the noise. If there was a way to change your “preferences” for the news and have high-quality, pre-selected stories delivered on a subscription basis, that could work.
What Negroponte mentioned in his book is the fact that people like options. They want to see different things, read different topics on different days.
Think about it this way- when a family buys the Sunday paper, certain people gravitate to “sections” of the paper. This is an old fashioned method. Take for example, my case – there was no “technology” section in the Toledo Blade. Maybe one article, so, in my case I was not getting the news I was interested in reading.
Is this a solution? Thoughts? What practical advice can we give to the journalism industry?