More thoughts on newmedia

I had the pleasure of attending a talk by journalist Jeremy Iggers yesterday. He has written about food, and has a PhD in philosophy. His columns about ethics and his active role in founding the Media Alliance give him a great perspective on the changes occuring in the Twin Cities media scene. The topic was, generally speaking, the future of newspapers. He pointed to the importance of newspapers is shaping an informed citizenry, and discussed the changes taking place now as the result of two forces: the culmination of decades of corporate consolidation in the dismantling of the news corps of many major newspapers in the chase after market demographics and profits, and the challenges posed by emerging digital technologies. As younger people turn to alternative sources for information and news, the corporate papers attempt to win their readership by dumbing down their news sections, but their strategies are neither successful with a younger generation, which can get better infotainment online, nor conducive to retaining their older readers who are disgusted with the abandonment of local and international political coverage.
Hence the anxiety about the future of the newspaper, and of serious journalism in general. On the other hand, both professionals and a growing number of "citizen journalists" are trying out new models of news gathering (blogs that aggregate and comment on news, for example), news production (operations like Alternet and the much-heralded MinnPost which will debut next week), news delivery (multi-media magazines, various kinds of interactivity, etc. After listening to his talk and to the questions and comments from the crowds, I came away with three thoughts: there will be some merit in finding new business models that attempt to make online/print versions of public television and pubic radio (like MPR or NPR) with greater editorial freedom and the ability to follow subjects in depth without the slavery to ad sales, although we have seen an ongoing corporatization of both of those enterprises as well); the more interesting experiment to me is the site that acts as a portal to the web presences of a variety of small specialized papers (Twin Cities Daily Planet with its 40+ community papers serving smaller interest groups or neighborhoods) because, while it aggregates and prioritizes, it is more of a portal for reader than a hierarchical virtual newsroom; we still haven't explored the full potential of blogs as a venue for public intellectuals to engage with the public, although we are seeing many experiments.

One area of profound unease over these changes has to do with the issue of expertise: whose standards will distinguish "real journalism" from amateur ranting? how to judge accuracy? how to build relations of trust between readers and writers in the absence of the culture of the craft or guild?

Another source of unease seems to be the illusion that at some time in the past, because there were fewer TV channels, there was more of a shared group experience, in which we all saw ourselves reflected as a community (I'm paraphrasing what Iggers said, using my own take informed by Benedict Anderson's ideas about nationalism and "imagined community" but this is not what he or the audience articulated explicitly). I think that this idea of a shared community was an effect, not something that really existed for a majority, and that what we are witnessing is rather the crisis of the intellectual class, whose expertise, whether in academia or in journalism, is being displaced in favor of other forms of judgment. This is why I like the title of Cristobal Cobo's book "Planeta Web 2.0: inteligencia colectiva of medias fast food?" The new media can be both forms of collective intelligence, populated by specialists and intellectuals as well as others, and can also be incredibly banal, sleazy, silly, fun forms of infotainment. And sometimes they can be both. What excites me about some fo these new media endeavors is that new voices are gaining audiences, audiences are becoming collaborators, and the mainstream media, which has demonstrably failed in its duties to provide civic engagement as well as a vehicle for ad sales, is having to respond.