BARBS

One of the funniest bits in recent memory had The Daily Show’s Jason Jones visiting the New York Times, and challenging Assistant Managing Editor Rick Berke to show him “one thing in [the paper] that happened today.”

The heart of the bit, of course, is that newspapers — emphasis on paper – are dead. Old. Yesterday’s news.

Perhaps they are, and there are certainly plenty of examples to prove the point, and observers smarter than I am to outline the argument. That said, however, I was thinking today about why it is that, for now, as much news as I consume online these days, I do not (yet?) want to let my hard-copy subscriptions go. And what I realized is, it boils down to rituals.

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A line from a longer blog post by San Jose State University journalism student Suzanne Yada:

Don’t teach social media tools, teach concepts behind them. Don’t teach Twitter, teach why Twitter.

I like that. Thanks, Suzanne.

NB: Suzanne’s post summarizes a panel discussion that included CUNY J-School Prof. Sandeep Junnarkar.

Here are a few things I am wondering about after the news events of this week:

1. If (when?) most (all?) journalists are soon to be come independent “backpack” practitioners — you’ve got all the tools, you’re on your own, good luck! — who will rescue those who, either through youth, inexperience, stupidity, or sheer bad luck, find themselves under arrest and in big trouble? What if, say, they not only don’t work for an actual organization with actual resources and support systems; but also don’t happen to work for a guy who happens to know the former President of the United States? What then? Say what you will about (mostly) corporate-owned “old media” companies (I know I certainly do); they do have systems in place for preventing what happened to Euna Lee and Laura Ling, and when it does happen, they have a bunch of back channels for protecting their people and getting them home safely (yes, I know there are exceptions; see, e.g., Daniel Pearl).

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I’ve been finding lots of good stuff out there as I spin around the Googles.

On why it’s premature to give up on journalism education: here’s a Q&A with CUNY’s J-School Dean Steve Shepard, who’s really talking the “new media” talk these days. Then there’s this good analysis from my former college classmate Will Bunch, who now runs the Attytood blog, in an OJR piece entitled “Don’t Dismiss Journalism Schools Just Because Newspapers Are In Trouble”:

“You can look at it two ways,” Bunch says. “The core values of journalism aren’t really changing. You have to understand what makes a good story, how to report it, and how to report fairly and with integrity. It was the exact same with Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper 150 years ago or with newfangled websites. That hasn’t changed.”

“What is radically different are important secondary things that schools have to account for. Journalists today need to understand that news is now a two way conversation between you and the audience. Don’t talk down to the audience. Audience members are active participants—they comment on stories, participate as sources, and provide information and tips. Schools can maintain their core values and work on that.”

“Schools also need to teach that journalists need to think as entrepreneurs. You don’t just write a story; you have to find an audience for it. That’s been ignored by many journalists, and it’s critical today.”

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Brian Stelter has written two excellent pieces for today’s New York Times, and whether he intended them to be read as a pair I don’t know, but together they paint quite a picture of the state of foreign news coverage.

The first article described the real-time criticism on Twitter of CNN’s (and other cablers’) relative lack of live news coverage of the weekend’s protests in Iran. “The channels largely took the weekend off as Tehran exploded in protests after Iran’s presidential election,” reads Stelter’s lede graf, and that led “untold thousands” to use the label “CNNfail” on Twitter to vent their frustrations.

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Today’s post is a question for CUNY Journalism students. I’m interested on your take on the coverage of the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. How well do you think the press has covered her personal and professional story? How well do you think the media has characterized her background in the Bronx? What about her work for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and La Raza? Do you think the media has done a good job of deconstructing the various charges that Judge Sotomayor is a “racist,” a “reverse racist,” and that she holds “radical” views?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments section, and thank you!

Here’s how Bernard Lunn, COO at ReadWriteWeb, answers his own question in an interesting blog post:

Yes, they would have.

We don’t need to protect journalism with public money or grants. The greater social good will be delivered by thousands of people on the ground reporting what is happening. That massive flow will be analyzed and edited (”curated”) by a small number of experts who are motivated and trained to uncover the truth.

It won’t be perfect. But the current system isn’t perfect either. It is fair to say, though, that scumbags won’t rest any easier. They will still be exposed.

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There’s a ragged-edge snippet of paper that’s been sitting on my desk for the past several weeks. It says, “All things good are simple.” I only know that I wrote it down after seeing it someplace, and I have been keeping it in plain view because it really does sum up how I feel about just about everything in life: all things good are simple; most things not-so-good are also the wrong kind of difficult.

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That’s the title of an interesting article that popped into my Google Reader today, one that tackles a topic I’ve been talking about a lot lately, but haven’t articulated quite as well as Steve Rosenbaum does. Curation, he says, is the new role of media professionals:

The old model was “one to many”  (NBC -> viewers). The new model is “one to a few” (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made “brand safe” for advertisers.

[snip]

Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and — most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better.

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Hat tip to Trace Sharp at NewsTechZilla for flagging this post:

Journalists find things out and tell people about it.

If you are teaching your students how to do that, you are not only doing your job, you are giving them the gift of a lifetime.

It is not your job to guarantee them stable employment.

I’m not even sure that stable employment is good for young journalists.

Journalists exercise power. Ideally, they exercise that power on behalf of the powerless. If they know nothing about what it is like to be powerless themselves, they may come to exercise their considerable power on behalf of the already powerful.

Teach them how to find out what is true and what is hidden, and how to say it so others can understand what it means and why it is important. Then you will have done your job and given them the gift of a lifetime.