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there's two or three different things there, seaver...
1. the expectation that's been created via the net that information is free. personally i am all for that in principle. in fact too, really. this is the problem that most newspapers and newspaper publishing organizations place at the center of their seemingly endless discussions about how to "monetize" the web.
2. problems within the existing newspaper model.
i like newspapers. i should say that i like more what newspapers were before employing researchers and writers became an externality, so before wire services became ubiquitous in the ways they are now, so before so much information was the same information--factoid format, no context or research, no critical perspective. infotainment. press releases reprinted as news because it's cheaper.
but this is a delegitimation from within, as a function of the marketization of newspapers. it seems to me that the web is only an aspect of this.
3. i understand the logic of moving into a blog model, but it seems to me the consequences of that are not good at all. total parochialization. loss of common reference-points, so a fragmentation of baseline culture. more bothersome, an amateurization of journalism.
what are the consequences of the erasure of journalists as professionals?
to what extent is the blog model itself enabled fundamentally by the existence of these professional sources of information?
another way: who vets blog information? there's an obvious lack of transparency in the form that is not in any way compensated for my it's immediacy (push a button and it's up). if in the present newspaper model there's already a problem of wire-service infotainment and press releases bouncing around in a hall of mirrors....it seems to me that this kind of decentralization would only make that worse.
thinking about this, though.
when you think about a more amateur-based blog-oriented journalism, what do you think of that enables you to see positive possibilities?
i know of some very good blogs, but they're more academic or more art/design oriented.
what about more journalistic ones?
are there emerging forms that are past blogs, that may supplant newspapers but which aren't mutant tv forms?
or is this a problem for print media as the primary medium for information relay.
or is it a problem for paper media as the vehicles for print? (the web is print)...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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