Background reading recommended by journalism prof Jay Rosen @ NYU:
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, by Clay Shirky
Excerpt: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead."
Old growth media and the future of news, by Steven Berlin Johnson
Excerpt: "I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell. But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two."
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I am totally with Shirky on the idea that journalism is what we will still have as newspapers fade away. I see forward thinking as a positive. Shirky is agreeing that in no doubt we will be newspaperless in the near future. So what needs to happen next? Journalists need to continue doing their job and explore the new methods of delivery. The world will still need journalists and those who go through the print major are clearly the most seasoned and intelligent writers coming from college. The goal will need to be how soon can journalists transform their skills to the computer screen? What can be done behind the screen to insure quality and accurate work? Time will tell.
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