it is dochs oars, sûnt 2001

Short [future of the media ii]

The echoes of Murdoch’s speech can still be heard:

• Alas, poor newspapers [column of the 2 v edition]
• Wired: newspapers aren’t dying. In fact, more people read traditional news outlets today than ever before. But they are doing it on a screen.
• Jay Rosen’s permanent comments on the ongoing revolution: KYOURADIO is the first radio station in the world to get all of its programming from podcasts.

  Nice quotes he collects as well:

  Working at a major metropolitan newspaper these days can feel a bit like working for the East German Politburo, circa 1988, […] It’s a good gig with great benefits, and people seek you out at cocktail parties, but you have this sense that your days are numbered.

Quote of the Day | 0315

I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts. My purpose was [to] see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride. That was the journalism of it. I wanted to move and to convince.

The part that gets me is, “I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts.” (Meaning: end the corruption.) No journalist at the Washington Post would say that today. […]

Jay Rosen, quoting the muckraker Lincoln Steffens in:
The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists

Quote of the Day | 0428

We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually understood as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of information. Otherwise, we take in information passively– if we take it in at all.

Christopher Lasch, as quoted by Jay Rosen
in: ‘What I Think I Know About Journalism’

Quote of the Day | 0916

Political journalism should help us get our bearings in a world of confusing claims and counter-claims. But instead we have savviness, the dialect of insiders bringing us into their games. Nothing is more characteristic of the savvy style than statements like “in politics, perception is reality.” Doesn’t that statement make you mad? Whenever I hear it, I want to interrupt and say, “No, no, no. You have it wrong. In politics, perception isn’t reality. Reality is reality!”

But then I stop myself. Because I realize I sound like a lunatic.

Jay Rosen, ‘Why Political Coverage is Broken’