tecznotes

Eyebeam brought this article, on MediaChannel, to my attention. It contained the following gem:

Much of the new investment in journalism today is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. Most sectors of the media are cutting back in the newsroom. While there are exceptions, in general journalists face real pressures trying to maintain quality.

This feels to me like the core problem with journalism today, and a larger problem with the news cycle of the internet. The big communications story of the 2004 presidential election was Blogs, and how political bloggers like Wonkette or DailyKos are making a new name for micropublishing, tightening the feedback loop of the news cycle from days to hours to minutes.

Blogs and bloggers do a shit job of documenting actual news, though - their sources are generally other blogs (or insiders, or other journalists, or rumors, which amounts to basically the same thing minus Moveable Type). This is fine for the national exercise in navel-gazing that makes up a great presidential campaign, but it does a real disservice to the the job of collecting and interpreting new information from places and cultures less wired than ours. I'm curious how the communications-medium-as-story story will play out in 2005.