- About the Lecture
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About the Lecture
Extra, extra, browse all about it! The newspaper (as we know it) is history. As David Thorburn handily describes the situation: “The younger the cohort is, the less interested it is in printed materials and the more committed to emerging technologies. The implication is, within 25 to 30 years, there won’t be people who want to read newspapers.” These panelists discuss newspapers’ transformation in the digital age.
While Dan Gillmor thinks it would be a tragedy if traditional newspapers didn’t survive, the current Internet- based democratization of media, with easily accessed “tools of production,” isn’t all bad. “Journalism has been a lecture, where we tell you what the news is, and you either buy it or you don’t. Now it’s moving into something like a conversation.” In this changed world, news organizations ask the public what they know about things. Remember the camera phone photo from the London Underground bombings? Imagine if this technology had been available at the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, muses Gillmor. It wouldn’t have been one guy with a camera, “but 1,000, all connected to digital networks. We’d know if anyone was on the grassy knoll or just one guy in the book depository.”
Ellen Foley acknowledges that her widely read Wisconsin State Journal is a rarity among smaller newspapers. “Unless you’re in prison, you’re reading our paper, but you’re not paying for it,” she says. She attributes her paper’s robust reach to its Midwest philosophy of “being a good neighbor.” This means journalists must not only share information, but listen to what readers want. She applies this approach both to the newspaper and to the paper’s website, where users vote every day on what makes the front page. Foley worries about the financial viability of her paper, but also hopes that the revenue generated from 21st century Internet technology “will support the 20th century values of telling the truth and making a difference in communities.”
Alex Beam pronounces himself a “skeptic of citizens’ media, whatever that means.” He’s grateful to papers like The New York Times, which “get slammed for saying things people don’t want presented. This is a time of transition where we haven’t quite balanced the equities of the readers and the professionals.” And don’t count on linked websites to aid newspaper survival, says Beam. As The Boston Globe is learning, it’s “a hard business model” for the web to generate money either through ads, or by charging readers for access to specialized material, like Boston Red Sox coverage or opinion columns. Beam says, “We haven’t found the price point for editorial judgment, for mediating experience. We’re still floundering. In the so-called traditional newspaper industry, there’s a lot of fear about what we can charge for this.”Related Videos
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- About the Speakers
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About the Speakers
Moderator: David Thorburn
MIT Professor of Literature
MacVicar Faculty Fellow Director, MIT Communications ForumDavid Thorburn has published widely on literary and cultural subjects and is currently completing a cultural history of American television, called Story Machine. He received his A.B. degree from Princeton, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford and taught at Yale for 10 years before joining MIT in 1976. He has edited collections of essays on romanticism, and on John Updike, as well as a widely used anthology of fiction, Initiation. He is a former Director of the Film and Media Studies Program and of the Cultural Studies Project.
Dan Gillmor
Director, Center for Citizen Media
Dan Gillmor is author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004; O’Reilly Media), and is working on a new book about media in the digital age. In 2005 Gillmor worked on citizen media through Grassroots Media Inc. From 1994-2005 he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During the 1986-87 academic year Gillmor was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics.
Ellen Foley
Editor, Wisconsin State Journal
Previously, Ellen Foley was managing editor for the Philadelphia Daily News; assistant managing editor for features at the Kansas City Star; and was a reporter, assignment editor and copy editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Before that, she held similar positions at the Milwaukee Sentinel and the Detroit News.
Alex Beam
Columnist, The Boston Globe
Alex Beam grew up in Washington, DC, in a family whose father was a career diplomat. Beam has been the Moscow and Boston bureau chief for Business Week,/u>. He was a John Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1996-97. Alex Beam has published two novels about Russia and has written for the Atlantic Monthly,/u>, Slate and Forbes/FYI.
- About the Host
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About the Host
MIT Communications Forum
Video Player
The Emergence of Citizen’s Media
- Moderator: David Thorburn
- Dan Gillmor
Ellen Foley
Alex Beam - September 19, 2006
- Running Time: 1:56:54
