MediaVidea

Media dystopia: it isn’t happening

JD Lasica at Social Media, co-founder of Ourmedia among other notable things, links to videos of Dan Gillmore talking about 1. the future of newspapers and 2. about the dangers from Telcos and cable companies.

Here is what I think.

1. Are we losing professional journalists as newspapers die?

That is a scary thought. Commenting on the negative aspects of Wikinews, Jimmy Wales once said that where Wikinews and other Citizen Media lagged behind traditional ones such as The New York Times was traditional hardcore investigative reporting, on the spot reporting and related stuff, which the trained journalist is perhaps better trained to do.

Taking an idea from the Future of news article on this blog, IMHO, professional journalists will need support in terms of donation drives (NPR), Pro-Am ventures (Assignment Zero), support from big guns (Craig Newmark funded New Assignment), support from Non-profits established especially to fund quality journalism.

Idea: Maybe, Bill Gates can do PR one-up on Google by creating a Citizen Media foundation with a $1 billion corpus aimed to fund local level quality journalism.

2. The influence of cable companies and Telcos who may control what we see.
We read about similar stuff during the Internet rising of 1993-onwards, when talks of 500 channels, controlling the last mile were entering the lexicon.

Think of it this way: after cheap PCs & server space which is fueling the so called Web 2.0 startup boom, bandwidth and access charges are next in line to crash.

Moreover, disruptive technologies including Wimax, Bluetooth-enabled local P2P servers, Open source mobile phones and others will soon start creating headaches for the big guns.

Rather, the main challenge for many publishers will be to keep calm, adapt fast and continue creating great pieces of journalism.

There will be many other changes and I am sure things are not as bad as they are. This is not the first time an industry has cried out in agony over the incredible pace of changes.

Link to Dan's Videos

Labels: citizen journalism, news

posted by Pramit Singh @ 5:01 PM