4 ms·

> but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket If you want 10 shallow disconnected sources

by serge2k 10y ago

> but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket If you want 10 shallow disconnected sources of information from the fringes then that works. If you want someone who knows where to go, who to talk to, and how to actually build out a story then you still need journalists.

grey-area 10y ago
Journalism, in spite of protestations to the contrary, has too often been a shallow gloss on half-understood ideas and a rushed frenzy to be first to print - to parachute in a correspondent to an unknown city/culture/subculture and expect them to understand it and not impose their prejudices on it while writing a story under time pressure is really expecting too much, and the results are often anything but insightful. The time pressure also regularly results in breathless stories without context and incomplete timelines with no closure and no revisiting the topic after the storm has passed. We can do better. Context and commitment and a large amount of original data is important in understanding information and people on the ground provide that (even if sometimes their view is limited, sometimes amongst them you'd find the best person to write the story of x). There are of course big problems with this flood of information, but it is now there (instantly, from anywhere on the globe), and it wasn't before. That changes everything. I do think there is value in having all that information, of course you still require a separate level of aggregation, analysis and perhaps narrative (Who will provide that? I think there is the opportunity), but the OP was talking about getting the data, that's now easy, the hard part is making sense of the firehose of data, which traditional journalism is ill-equipped to do given its emphasis on owning the story and speed to press. There is value in constructing a narrative based on the facts but the old business models of a news factory which 'makes news' and gets it to the public first in order to sell advertising are irrevocably gone now, they just haven't realised they are obsolete yet, and are scrabbling around for ways to adapt their old news-gathering infrastructure to this new world.

by serge2k 10y ago

grey-area 10y ago

Journalism, in spite of protestations to the contrary, has too often been a shallow gloss on half-understood ideas and a rushed frenzy to be first to print - to parachute in a correspondent to an unknown city/culture/subculture and expect them to understand it and not impose their prejudices on it while writing a story under time pressure is really expecting too much, and the results are often anything but insightful. The time pressure also regularly results in breathless stories without context and incomplete timelines with no closure and no revisiting the topic after the storm has passed. We can do better. Context and commitment and a large amount of original data is important in understanding information and people on the ground provide that (even if sometimes their view is limited, sometimes amongst them you'd find the best person to write the story of x). There are of course big problems with this flood of information, but it is now there (instantly, from anywhere on the globe), and it wasn't before. That changes everything. I do think there is value in having all that information, of course you still require a separate level of aggregation, analysis and perhaps narrative (Who will provide that? I think there is the opportunity), but the OP was talking about getting the data, that's now easy, the hard part is making sense of the firehose of data, which traditional journalism is ill-equipped to do given its emphasis on owning the story and speed to press. There is value in constructing a narrative based on the facts but the old business models of a news factory which 'makes news' and gets it to the public first in order to sell advertising are irrevocably gone now, they just haven't realised they are obsolete yet, and are scrabbling around for ways to adapt their old news-gathering infrastructure to this new world.