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Archive for June 3rd, 2009
The Future of Journalism
[UPDATE: Good coverage from The New York Observer on the event below.]
I just attended a lively panel discussion at NYU’s J-school, entitled, “The Future of Media: 2009,” which featured major players from newspaper, magazine, and blogging worlds. A video will go up soon at I Want Media, which sponsored the event. In the meantime, here’s two soundbites from my notes:
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter: There’s a “need to provide a cohesive story” to tweets. “Getting into the massive repository with no context is a little overwhelming.”
Bonnie Fuller, former editor of US Weekly: “Twitter has tapped into this enormous need of people to be stars in their own lives.” She likens Twitter “to your own reality show.”
There were a number of interesting conversation threads, such as a few fanciful thoughts on how to monetize newspaper journalism in the digital age (via Bonnie Fuller), why most print reporters make for lousy bloggers (via Nick Denton–of course), and so on. Nick David Carr was there for the NY Times. Maybe he’ll cover it in his media column.
I’ll have more later.
The Countdown
I’ve been traveling so I missed ABC’s big show last night, but if this criticism (below) is on target, then perhaps another missed opportunity…
From a columnist at the SF Examiner:
The evil that ABC did in broadcasting Earth 2100 will live on long after them. By presenting a fictional account of future global warming, they will make it far more difficult to do what we do need to do to combat global warming.
What is the Way Forward?
A news service of the U.N. that I find useful for its dispatches from developing countries asks, in an article, if there is a danger of “information overload” with the spate of alarming reports on the consequences of climate change, such as the most recent one released last week from the Global Humanitarian Forum.
What to do? According to the U.N. piece,
The media are supposed to turn these numbers, reports, predictions and projections into “meaningful information” for the people who will be affected by the unfolding impact of climate change.
But then the article seemingly confuses the media with think tanks when it says that
The Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum in its climate change report, “The Anatomy of Silent Crisis,” released on 29 May, attempts to do this.
First of all, as Andrew Revkin at The New York Times pointed out,
There are significant questions about the robustness of the numbers at the heart of the new report [by the Forum] estimating more than 300,000 deaths are already being caused each year by global warming, with nearly twice that number possible by 2030.
Secondly, as I noted here, apart from Revkin, the rest of the media didn’t offer “meaningful information” about this report.
On a different note, over at The New Security Beat, Geoff Dabelko cautions about hyping the collapse meme, because
fear and depression without a path or a way forward leads to tuning out or rejection as oversell. We saw it with the fantastical version of climate in the [movie] Day After Tomorrow…an oversell that is a target and easier mark for opponents.
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