The future of news skews young and is not rectangular
Jose Antonio Vargas is an under-30 who recently left his plum job at the Washington Post as a technology reporter/writer to become the editor of HuffingtonPost tech section. [Disclosure: I know Jose and may contribute to his HuffPo section on technology.]
He’s posted a terrific article that calls to task the Newseum’s ten part TV series on The Future of News that seems to include no one under 40 years old. Now, as a 58-year-old, I’m certainly sensitive to the formal fallaciousness of an argument that says 40+ folks can’t understand the future that will be built by 20+ folks. Nevertheless, Jose is right to raise the red flag about a project that seems not to be listening to the young. (That “seems” is important; the show hasn’t aired yet. It may be full of The Kids, even as it promotes itself using older, more established news critics.)
As the over 30 year old Clay Shirky says, we are in the middle of — or start of — a real revolution in news. And not just in the business models. Traditional news has fit into rectangles: Pages, time slots. News now moves like ragged ripples through unstable water. We really don’t know what will become of it and of the institutions that assume (rightly or wrongly) a public homogeneously informed. The future of non-rectangular news is being linked together right now. And even if that future were being created solely by middle-aged women and men, its success, effect, and meaning rests almost entirely on the young.
Sometimes prognosticators go too far.
In drinking the koolaid they come to believe that ‘information wants to be free’ (forgetting that it’s people who want to be free to distribute it), and then I have just as much of a hard time persuading the young radicals that the market for intellectual work hasn’t ended by any stretch, just as I have a hard time persuading the old fogies that the market for copies has indeed ended.
I have to play against both ends.
It’s not an ending, not an end of an era of prosperity, but a paradigm inversion, a role reversal only in terms of dominance (not in terms of exchange).
People are already pronouncing the end of blogging, let alone the end of newspapers. See my comments attempting to dispel such FUD here:
Paying a blogger to write, to produce intellectual work, is a completely different value proposition to paying a publisher for copies of an intellectual work (that the publisher has paid a blogger for).
We’re looking at a paradigm inversion:
from ‘distribution of artist’s work to audience for their money’
to ‘distribution of audience’s money to artist for their work’.
It’s the same exchange, but inverted as if in a mirror. Just as feasible, but a curiously indigestible concept (I find very few who have the stomach for it, let alone the cognitive ability to grok it).
[...] Joho the Blog » The future of <b>news</b> skews young and is not rectangular [...]
[...] Joho the Blog » The future of <b>news</b> skews young and is not rectangular [...]
The world is a tyranny run by british public schoolbys their half human elders and perrenial monsters. God save the conga free our nessie now!