Tuesday, December 22, 2009

How is the Post-Print Mindset Changing Journalism?

In his compelling column, "After a Year of Ruin, Some Hope," New York Times "The Media Equation" columnist David Carr wrote about some of the positive changes impacting the media.

For one, Carr points out that some "old-school magazines...are moving very aggressively to refashion their brands for a tablet world and rightly so" -- that is, they're embracing new platforms. The key is for publishers to to move out of the nomenclature of 'subscriptions' for content and into the universe of 'applications,' there may be some gold in those hills."

Carr also points to changes in journalism as a result of new technologies and platforms:
  • "On the subject of Twitter, we should point out that new generations of consumers are now guided to important news by the recommendations of trusted friends, and increasingly, they point to great reporting in sources that didn’t exist just a few years ago."
  • "The founder of Gawker, Nick Denton, told me in a note that The Huffington Post and TMZ have demonstrated that news scoops are the coin of the realm and that Gawker will be heading in that direction. He suggested that the Web was further atomizing into sites that create original content and break news, and others that alter photos, float wild speculation or just gin up any old thing that will draw traffic."
  • "And just as new media have absorbed the enduring values of traditional media — developing sources, making phone calls — so more established players are adopting the tools of the insurgency."
  • "Meanwhile, journalism schools are no longer content just to teach the inverted pyramid. A few weeks ago, I was at CUNY’s graduate school of journalism to help judge presentations from more than a dozen teams of young media entrepreneurs. There were some clunkers, as there always are, but there were also some scary good, real-world proposals from students who don’t have to think out of the box because they were never in one to begin with."
My question: how are you seeing journalism change to adapt to social media and new platforms? I'm not interested in a debate of whether the evolution is good or bad -- that's irrelevant because it's happening regardless. What will be different about how journalism is practiced in 2010? Will traditional media focus more on breaking news -- before it can be validated by two or more sources? Let us know.

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