• the first draft of history

THE FUTURE OF NEWS

WHO IS WRITING THE FIRST DRAFT OF HISTORY?

From Dan Gillmor’s blog entry about the Tsunami and Citizen Journalism:

“We used to call mainstream journalism the "first draft of history." Now, I'd argue, much of that first draft is being written by citizen journalists. And what they're telling us is powerful indeed.”

What will journalism and news look like in the future?

A whole bunch of people are queuing up to transform Big Media in the brave new age of the blog, internet chat and cell phones. Some are even quitting their current media jobs in their efforts to build a new sort of journalism.

Some of the slogans being thrown into the melting pot are:

• “citizen journalism”
• “we the media”, (recent book title)
• “press think” (on the need to think about what media has avoided thinking about)
• “journalism 2.0”
• “capitalism without capital” (lower entry costs)
• “information ought to be free”
• “transforming a lecture into a conversation”
• “the state of permanent revision” (there is no ultimate authority)
• “my readers know more than I do” (and now they have the technology to communicate)
• “peer to peer”
• “distributed knowledge”
• “roll your own”
• “many to many”

Newspapers are in trouble. Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. Will the print media collapse within 30 years, "when the dead-tree readers will die off? (from Wired article)

And then there's the problem of barely skimmed newspapers cluttering up your house

Dan Gillmor has written a book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, which is being distributed over the Internet for free by the publisher O’Reilly.  

“… for the first time in history, a global, continuous feedback loop among a considerable number of the people in possible. This may not overthrow everything … but it most assuredly does ***change*** everything.”

and,

“Gillmor is riveting and 100% on target when he explores the meaning of all this for Homeland Security. He points out that not only is localized observation going to be the critical factor in preventing another 9-11, but that the existing budget and program for homeland security does not provide one iota of attention to the challenge of soliciting information from citizens, and ensuring that the "dots" from citizens get processed and made sense of.”

- from Robert D Steele, top 100 amazon readers review of We the Media

Jay Rosen (PressThink)  has identified four strains on professional journalism –

1. citizen critics becoming more vocal
2. many to many technologies are replacing one to many technologies
3. Absolute Commercialisation polluting most media environments
4. journalistic professional culture is not as open as it might be

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2003/08/18/introduction_ghost.html

Rosen has come up with his top ten ideas of 2004 – “not the ‘best’ ideas, but the ones most useful to me in figuring out what’s going on”

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/12/26/tptn04_intro.html

Here are some snippets:

He said, she said, we said. This is simply the argument that journalists ought not to allow things to remain at the level of "He said, she said." It's hard to say why--exactly why--but in 2004 it became clear to the clearest-thinking journalists: Leave the field when there is a head-on collision between incompatible truth claims and you are being neither responsible nor fair. (idea 2)

What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press is doing to the media church (idea 3)

“once an effective horizontal network (the Web) arrived, professional journalism had a natural competitor” ( from idea 4)

“the cost of putting like-minded people in touch with each other is falling” (from ideas 4, 8 )

“It's not just lecturing (bad, bad) vs. conversing (good, good); it's who has control. And who no longer has exclusive control. The news media could at one time control whatever corrections and revisions were made to its accounts.” (from idea 5)

 It won't take 30 years before the print media is transformed into something very different. I look forward with glee to the demise of The Adelaide Advertiser

REFERENCE

Wired News: Newspapers Should Really Worry

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65813,00.html

Capitalism Without Capital

http://www.techcentralstation.com/010305A.html

Long tail comment: The reduced significance of capital means that the cost of entry is lowered in many industries

dan gillmor on grassroots journalism blog

http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/

the future of journalism by the people, for the people

We the Media by Dan Gillmor

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp

Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (open book O'Reilly)

pressthink: ghost of democracy in the media machine by Jay Rosen

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/

I call this blog PressThink because that's the kind of work I do. The title points to forms of thought that identify "journalism" to itself-- but also to the habit of not thinking about certain things

• video blogging has taken off as a result of the tsunami, with an Australian  blogger displaying videos at a central location

Waveofdestruction.org, created by Australian Geoffrey Huntley, is hosting tsunami videos. According to Huntley, Waveofdestruction.org was created on December 28 "to serve as a central location for videos/photos related to the tsunami"

• the Web has become a major source of collecting aid with bloggers in the forefront of organising and directing users to aid sites

Web donations outstripped phone donations two to one as people decided online was the best way to donate. The Amazon.com relief fund, alone, raised more than $10 million in the week after the disaster.

• Traffic to some blogger created tsunami sites has been double the traffic to The Age site