If you wanted a sign of the growing importance of the UK news media in reporting US politics (a phenomenon supported by Matt Drudge, the now global online market in English language news, and the largely apolitical US press), here it is.
Media Matters, a Democratic-leaning MSM rebuttal service, turns its powerful fisking attention to this Times report. Continue reading
Like Jeff Jarvis, Charlie Beckett, and Richard Sambrook, I too was at Ditchley recently for a conference on the media and democracy. Present company excepted, it brought together a fascinating and lively group of people (not always the case at conferences).
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, formerly Britain’s man at the UN and in Iraq (and someone who speaks in perfect paragraphs), gives his impressions below (bold, italics, and broken paras are me).
For the record, I’m more pessimistic about democracy than about journalism — but I also think Google — the accidental monopolist — should step up to the plate and fund some independent content resource (listen — that’s the sound of me not holding my breath). Continue reading
I’ve been pondering the relationship between journalism and democracy of late, and so too have the academic commenters gathering at the blog of Social Science Research Council boss, Craig Calhoun.
Calhoun asks the question Sam Zell has already answered — What is the future of newspapers? And when social scientists smell blood, they’re mostly rubbing their hands at the prospect of a fresh cadaver to dissect rather than offering sympathy or solutions.
There’s not much in the comments that regular readers won’t be overly familiar with — foundation-funded journalism anyone? But buried within them is Michael Schudson offering his usual top class, analytical two cents: Continue reading
I fully expect that most television journalists will not have dived into a copy of Switching Channels: Organization and Change in TV Broadcasting by Richard E. Caves. Freakonomics it is not.
But Caves is the guy (ok, Nathaniel Ropes Research Professor of Political Economy at Harvard) who suggested something that may be appealing to journalists when considering the news media’s current economic plight. Continue reading
The Columbia Journalism Review takes on a familiar trope — the scarcity of attention — and riffs on it in relation to journalism.
Attention—our most precious resource—is in increasingly short supply. To win the war for our attention, news organizations must make themselves indispensable by producing journalism that helps make sense of the flood of information that inundates us all.
Attention, with respect to Herbert Simon, is not scarce. It is a constant.
It’s just managed in ways that readers of the Columbia Journalism Review may find disappointing. Continue reading
My chums — the Carnivores of Journalism (read in tooth and claw) — are ripping apart the lessons for the news media from the online electoral campaigning of President-elect Barack Obama.
Here’s my message for the old news media. You missed a revenue stream. Auction endorsements.
Don’t be fooled by the SMS and Facebook wrappers. This is not the Paypal public sphere. We’re not all friends and Obama didn’t twitter his way to the White House. Continue reading