Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
Summary: At the Summit at Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., Tony Perkins, founder of AlwaysOn, moderates a discussion about the state of journalism in the Digital Age with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Quentin Hardy of Forbes, and Robert Scoble of Scobelizer. They discuss how Apple's iPad could bring back long-form journalism because of its design.
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RE: Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
you are 100% correct
RE: Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
I will disagree that corporations killed journalism. I think that there are two factors killing journalism.
First, the market. This has been slowly happening in the market. We've been getting more and more of our news in the sound bites of television. As a populace, we have lost a lot of our attention span. This part of what has driven journalism to become part of these large corporations. They weren't getting the market on their own so they had to partner with larger news corporations. This has brought some innovation and you can find some of these newspapers with an online presence. I don't have any subscriptions to them, but if I did I would probably prefer to just get my news online than the rag on my doorstep. While partly due to "conserving" paper, the reality is that I found that I read more news online than I am likely to pick up the paper we already get on our doorstep.
Unfortunately, number two reason, is that journalism has been killing itself. Sad but I believe to be true. It is very common for us to resist change. Now some grandmothers are adept at picking up the computer, but I am sure that many of us know stubborn people that we associate with generations past and unwilling to enter the digital age (and some of these aren't that old either). So while reporters might be walking around with blackberries and laptops, just because they have the tools doesn't mean I believe they are truly adapting to the changing markets. If they truly embraced change and moving into the future, there probably would be talk about reinventing how they deliver our news in this new market using the tools around us than how one device might save it. By the way, there already is blackberries and many other internet enabled phones that people are using to watch the "news" that interests them. Why haven't I read about journalism pushing into these markets? Why now the iPad? I think this tells me that they have been resisting change and now that they have something that sort of resembles smart readers (and thus digital books) that are finally starting to really make the transition. But it might be too little and too late....
As a "bonus" reason, I will tell you why I stopped reading a local newspaper. One of the local papers claims to be "independent" of the dominant local religion. Okay. I am fine with that. They don't have to be of my faith to get my respect. However, every time there was bad news having to do with religion, that paper had one trend that plain as the nose on my face. If it was another religion, I never found any reference to which faith. It would be just another Christian faith. If it was our faith, it would prominently appear that someone of our faith (and if they were in some leadership role that was sure to be mentioned too) did something all of us would accept as morally wrong. And anything good, well, that was skipped and never mentioned. Now is that an unbiased newspaper? Some argued with me that yes it was. As for myself, I knew better. I did a research paper once on a movie that had good reviews. Personally I couldn't stand the movie, so I picked from those reviews and put together a research paper that showed the movie as structurally flawed. I never lied, but by picking through the truths for the truths I wanted to share it changed the report. I knew what I was doing. I also did not hide it from my instructor. I got an A on that research paper. Just because I had a viewpoint did not mean I slacked off in abiding by the rules of the assignment. Well, when I saw one paper do this biased reporting, I began to weigh a lot of supposed journalism by this concept and found a lot of journalism biased, and biased in a way I disagreed with. Even in a full page spread, you still don't have the space to share all the facts, so you have to pick and choose. I accept that part. The choices made, and the wording of it, sometimes give away how the journalist thinks about a subject.... I stopped reading most journalism a while ago. I still try and get some news in my life, but the internet actually opened up the possibility for me to pick and choose quickly. Sometimes just the headline gives me the first clue on how the opinion writer or occasional journalist is going to cover the event(s) referred to. Sometimes I read them anyways even if I disagree with their viewpoint, but now I go in realizing that "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view." And I realize that applies to myself as well. Which is why I get frustrated with "news" because when you assume that you have no point of view than you set yourself up to fail to see when you are inserting your point of view. This is why I avoided putting my reason for not reading journalism as reason #3. It is my point of view and may only apply to me.
Journalism is not dead
People who actually care about the facts and disseminating them are now performing journalism.
For all the slander spewed by the administration and the MSM, it is the MSM that nearly killed journalism, by abusing the 4th estate and making it their personal social engineering tool.
Only leftists who fear their agenda being crippled by actual journalism taking place outside their control claim that "the web killed journalism".
This is just more liberal elitism. Oh, people aren't reading enough on the web, so they don't get the *true* story.
But, they'll read more on an iPad? No, but the yuppie weenies who are the biggest iPad fans will read anything that appears on their magic box, and swallow it just as unthinkingly.
If I only want hits... yeah, that's it, web journalists only want hits. The NY Times doesn't want to sell papers (obviously)... NBC doesn't want viewership (obviously)...
The Sherrod controversy got so much attention because it was NEWS. It was horrible, because it contradicted the liberal meme that only white males can be racist.
Like with any product, consumers decide, and should decide, what news they consume. Giving them only the news (however distorted) TPTB thinks they should be interested in is not journalism; it's indoctrination.
RE: Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
I'm sure newspapers, magazines, etc will tell you the web killed journalism, but the truth is that the web is killing "traditional media channels".
Anyone to watch the rest of this Video?
RE: Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
Didier
RE: Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
RE: Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
Besides, it is helping journalism to become more effective and more efficient in delivering the news as they happen.
RE: Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
The Web saved journalism, actually...
RE: Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back?
Now who wants to go off on a stream of consciensnous rant on that?.using your ipad of course