Monday, March 5, 2007

An optimistic view

The Race is Robert Kuttner's take (in Columbia Journalism Review) on where newspapers are headed. His bottom lines...

...if the dailies do their jobs, the next generation will still read newspapers—online.

My reporting suggests that many big dailies have turned the corner, though only barely and just in time, that newspapers have started down a financially and journalistically viable path of becoming hybrids, without losing the professional culture that makes them uniquely valuable.

Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, rss feeds, and God knows what else. But whether newspapers are print or Web matters far less than whether they maintain their historic calling.

Their historic calling, by the way, included the sanctioning of free archives in city and school libraries. Now those archives need to be free on the Web. Just like last Thursday's paper.

I'm a broken record on this, but it's the Right Thing To Do.

Old clues, new training

One reason Cluetrain still sells is that it's required for coursework here and there. Take JMC163: New Media in Journalism, at the School of Journalism & Mass Communications at San Jose State University. (Which I see has a blog.) Here are Cluetrain-related posts from the course blog.

Freedom to Dig

I'm digging the Freedom to Connect (F2C) conference, where I was slated to attend until local necessities required staying home. Still, I'm "there" by group chat and webcast. It's a good show.