Jay Rosen has a terrific post about the state of media, beginning with this clip from the film “Network”:
Pretty timely, eh?
Jay analyzes the scene:
… the filmmakers are showing us what the mass audience was: a particular way of arranging and connecting people in space. Viewers are connected “up” to the big spectacle, but they are disconnected from one another. Or to use the term I have favored, they are “atomized.” But Howard Beale does what no television person ever does: he uses television to tell its viewers to stop watching television.
When they disconnect from TV and go to their windows, they are turning away from Big Media and turning toward one another. And as their shouts echo across an empty public square they discover just how many other people had been “out there,” watching television in atomized simultaneity, instead of doing something about the inarticulate rage that Beale put into words. (“I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the streets. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad!”)
He goes on to ask what would happen today in response to a “Howard Beale” event…
Immediately people who happened to be watching would alert their followers on Twitter. Someone would post a clip the same day on YouTube. The social networks would light up before the incident was over. Bloggers would be commenting on it well before professional critics had their chance. The media world today is a shifted space. People are connected horizontally to one another as effectively as they are connected up to Big Media; and they have the powers of production in their hands.
Jay follows with an expansion of his comments, and concludes with a set of recommendations for today’s journalists. (The post is a must-read for journalists and news bloggers.)
There’s been too much hand-wringing over the supposed collapse of journalism as we know it, but journalism’s never been more exciting, never had the kind of tools and channels of information available today. We’re seeing, not collapse, but evolution. I’m wanting to spend more and more time with journalists, and think more and more about the relationship of professional journalism to blogging and other more or less informal information channels.
Riiight, but if you dig down into the comments, and I mean waaay down, he does this little jiu-jitsu where he admits he can’t figure out how anyone’s going to get paid for all of this. And, nice ideas notwithstanding, this leaves us with a serious problem: if the only people who can afford to do journalism are the wealthy, we get a press of the wrong kind of elite.
Some think nonprofit news organizations are the answer. As the traditional news organizations increasingly focus on entertaining fluff that will readily sell, hard news could move into the nonprofit space and syndicate, selling to the former news organizations that no longer want to carry a traditional hard news operation. That’s one thought about the changing business model and market space.