4 ms·

The future of journalism is, imho, oceans of random trash (think Business Insider or the Daily Mail) on the one hand side, and rock star columnists and investig

The future of journalism is, imho, oceans of random trash (think Business Insider or the Daily Mail) on the one hand side, and rock star columnists and investigators (think popular bloggers like John Gruber or The Macalope) on the other. To succeed as a syndication platform in this, methinks you either need to be very good at satisfying yourself with a fickle audience looking for subpar content while making numbers work in your favor, or syndicate the rock stars in razor focused channels (The Magazine or Flipboard) that your quality audience will value enough to stay around. Whether traditional newspapers will survive this transition any more than music publishers is anyone's guess. I'm not holding my breath for most of them -- quality is simply too low.

notatoad 12y ago
I think your placing of John Gruber and theMacalope among the side opposite the "oceans of random trash" really says it all: the future of journalism is not two sides, it's just oceans of trash. the future of actual journalism is probably something like Pierre Omidyar's new venture - Benevolent billionaires supporting actual investigative journalism because it provides some public good, and not expecting it to be profitable on a scale like big media houses such as the New York Times are expected to work.
- neumann 12y ago
  and yet the Guardian (in Australia) which is owned by a trust spends the centre of its landing page real-estate on tacky opinion pieces to compete with local tacky opinion pieces. Article such as "Can you <insert phrase> and still call yourself a feminist (immediate bingo if there reference is to sex/porn)" and "Twerking - everything you need to know" have begun to appear[1] I am not sure if a Trust, or philanthropic entity solves the problem while we still refer to DailyMail or HuffPo as a 'news site'. 'Trash aggregator' would be more appropriate. [1] Made up titles.

notatoad 12y ago

I think your placing of John Gruber and theMacalope among the side opposite the "oceans of random trash" really says it all: the future of journalism is not two sides, it's just oceans of trash. the future of actual journalism is probably something like Pierre Omidyar's new venture - Benevolent billionaires supporting actual investigative journalism because it provides some public good, and not expecting it to be profitable on a scale like big media houses such as the New York Times are expected to work.

neumann 12y ago
and yet the Guardian (in Australia) which is owned by a trust spends the centre of its landing page real-estate on tacky opinion pieces to compete with local tacky opinion pieces. Article such as "Can you <insert phrase> and still call yourself a feminist (immediate bingo if there reference is to sex/porn)" and "Twerking - everything you need to know" have begun to appear[1] I am not sure if a Trust, or philanthropic entity solves the problem while we still refer to DailyMail or HuffPo as a 'news site'. 'Trash aggregator' would be more appropriate. [1] Made up titles.