On Tuesday, November 11, Columbia’s Journalism School convened its annual “Changing Media Landscape” panel to discuss the current state of the news media and the direction it will take in the future. Participants—Sewell Chan, editor of The New York Times’s City Room blog; Jacob Weisberg, chairman of Slate; Erica Smith, news designer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Paper Cuts blog; Adriano Farano, executive editor of CafeBabel.com; and David Cohn, founder of the crowd-funding investigative platform Spot.us—found both reasons to be hopeful and reasons to be vigilant.
One reason to be vigilant, according to Weisberg: “New media and the traditional media are diverging rapidly after a period of peaceful coexistence,” he said. “We are moving into a conflict model.”
One reason to be hopeful, though, is that conflict often leads to innovation. “Finally, experimentation is being embraced,” Cohn said. “We should think of it as research and development; journalism will survive on the shoulders of its failures.”
Listen to the discussion here.
The innovation is consumer protection a la MPAA, ESRP, BBB, FDA, RIAA, except that in this case it will be product news quality content labeling reflecting ethical journalistic rigor, per story, for the benefit of the consumer.
learn more at http://www.ceasespin.org or http://FixNewsNow.org
Posted by ceasespin on Sat 22 Nov 2008 at 09:52 AM
The sad truth is that as the stuggle continues between free and sponsered media it is the journalistic integrity that looses out. What is news and what is oppinion. What is the difference between a bystander's account and a true journalistic interview with the same person? And who is going to pay for news when you can get the same content for free. It's not everyday the US will elect its first non-anglo President. Print will not survive merely as a 'souvanir.' Let's step back and really think about where we want the media to end up and what we expect from first class journalism. The New York Times is a beacon of light in a dim future for the print medium. Let's learn and adapt- after all it's our generation deciding the future of the world's media.
Posted by sarah on Sun 21 Mar 2010 at 05:31 AM