By Katharine Mieszkowski Maybe we're asking all the wrong questions about the Future of Journalism. Maybe the real puzzle isn't where will we get our news 10 years from now and who will pay for it? But rather: How will we differentiate what's true and what's not from the flood of media that's likely to be swirling all around us?
Writing on the Harvard Business Review blog, Dan Gillmor, who runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's j-school, argues that the danger of the future isn't that there won't be enough news. Instead, the democratization of media, where everyone can now be a publisher on the Web, means that we'll all be even more media-saturated than we are today. So, we're likely to all have more trouble distinguishing between what's credible, what's fishy and what's outright bunk.
"Media saturation requires us to become more active as consumers, in part to manage the flood of data pouring over us each day but also to make informed judgments about the significance of what we do see," he writes. Gillmor offers a few suggestions on how to be a better media consumer, including approaching everything with skepticism, but not being equally skeptical about everything.
It sounds like he envisions consumers of news adopting the stance of reporters. Maybe in the Future of Journalism, we're all journalists.
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Comments
This sounds like a nonsensical proposition, unless the free time of the average consumers doubles or triples (not likely with the economy tanking) and unless the education level magically improves (want to bet on it?).
Until this happens those who want to get the news at all will do it the way it was always done: taking it mostly on faith from people they trust.
And that leads us back to the journalists: are they trustworthy? Your answer is as good (and should be even better) than mine.
But until the media keeps hiding behind the false practice that for each reasonable opinion they also have to line up a partisan hack with his fake "flat earth" ideas to act as a counter point, and pretend that this serves the interest of the unsuspecting viewer, I will not trust such circus as decent reporting.
Reporting, by the way, should be reasonably truthful and not balanced between reasonable and unreasonable.
o) Read David Brin's "Earth"
o) You'll trust the sources that you view as credible. I read NRO, but I don't trust it; I trust digby a lot more.
Jon Stewart being our most trusted newsman is the harbinger of the future. Maybe.
Disdain for the MSM does not come solely from the right. Neither the left and the right thought that the MSM was partisan enough, or "hard-hitting" enough. Now that MSM is being replaced by the "faith-based" Babelization of "new media", partisans of all stripes can find blogs and "news outlets" that report what they want to hear. Drudge and HuffPo or Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann, are opposite sides of the same coin - yins and yangs of fluffy, opinion-rich partisan pabulum delivered daily to the faithful. If you want to know which team your favorite new media maven is fighting against - just see who they call "Nazis".
Faith may move mountains, but it doesn't uncover truth. That's better left to the scientific method, whether it's applied by to the natural world, or to journalism. Skepticism and an open mind are the foundation of the scientific process, as they are for journalism. But this method takes intellectual rigor, and it's very time consuming. Which is why it was best left to professional journalists, who have the time and the training. It's true that there are a few amateurs on the web who are doing a credible job of blogging and reporting, but they are rare specks of gold in the vast gravel banks of outrageous hyperbole that the "new media" has become.
You say we have to "to become more active as consumers" and "to make informed judgments about the significance of what we do see". I don't know which is less likely. That each one of us has the intelligence, the skepticism and the dedication to fact-check every "new media" story ourselves. Or that we will abandon our biases to make the effort. I'm convinced that Glenn Beck's listeners have no desire to check anything he says against the NY Times or the BBC. Nor are the avid patrons of "Loose Change" about to start reading National Review or David Brooks.
Before the rise of the "new media" even the most partisan among us had a hard time ignoring reasonable, well-researched news, because that was mostly what was available. But now that "new media" Babelization has killed the MSM, the partisan gap is widening. No one has to read or hear anything that makes them question their "faith-based" world view.