Is the fragmentation or segmenting of audiences on the Web an opportunity to report deeply on a topic to a narrow audience? Or does it spell the decline of general-interest publications? Other thoughts on the article?
Please comment here on this article by noon, April 14.
Gillmor calls the advent of non-professional journalism “one of the healthiest media developments in a long time.” Do you agree? Gillmor cites examples of independent journalists being able to support their efforts through advertising or direct support from readers. Do you expect this business model to grow? What does this mean for traditional media outlets?
Please comment here on this reading by noon, April 14.
For only $18 a month, you can build your own user-generated news site at Instant Journalist. Journalism.co.uk interviewed founder Scott Durham. Is this the future of news?
Here is a very interesting documentary on the future of journalism. It’s called “Orwell Rolls In His Grave.”
Here is an interesting article from the New York Times. It looks into the lives of some really successful bloggers and how incredibly overworked they are. It also gives a good look into how blogs that make money operate, and how they compensate their writers.
A supercool New Yorker article about the evolution of spam and the corresponding war against it. I read it a long time ago, but this is one of those articles that stick. Unlike spam, which merely congeals.
“When Vannevar Bush first dreamt of hyperlinks back in the 1940s, surely he envisioned something tidier than the link riots that erupt on many of today’s Web pages, ” writes Jack Shafer for Slate yesterday.
Shafer rails against useless links, but his own is worth checking out.
Links that Stink: Grumbling about the misuse of hyperlinks on news sites.
The Chicago Tribune has rolled out Chicago’s Best Blogs, a collection of local- interest blogs organized by topic and profiles of local bloggers.
In his latest article for The New Yorker, Eric Alterman charts the decline of the American newspaper as we know it. He finds some reason for journalistic optimism in the work of the more successful news blogs including The Huffington Post. But, he posits, where would such blogs be without the traditional news outlets to feed them material? Will blogs and other news Web sites step up to fill the gap in serious reporting or will they continue to play off the work of others? Some other interesting ideas here, too. Post your comments by noon, April 7.
In 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush called on his fellow scientists to develop new tools to record and organize the wealth of their knowledge.
Bush wrote: ” The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
What do you think of Bush’s ideas? What technologies did he anticipate with accuracy and which would be useful inventions today? Have we developed adequate tools to access and evaluate new scientific developments? Or is our world closer to what Bush saw in 1945, too much information, poorly organized.
This article is available for student access in Blackboard/Documents/Week One. Please post your comments on this article by noon, Monday, April 7.