On Sun, 2009-03-15 at 16:36 +0000, Dave Crossland wrote: > > But make money for whom? Those doing the activity at the core of the > profession - in the case of newspapers, the reporters; in the case of > music, the artists - or for those involved in the profession in roles > peripheral to it's core, and shareholders? > > "We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather > than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the more time > we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the > less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one." > - > http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/ >
I've been working as an online journalist since 1996, and I think all of us (in journalism) are trying to figure out one thing: How do we support journalism (and by extension the journalists who do it)? We're not talking about keeping the publishers in a state in which they have become accustomed. Everyone in my patch is talking about how to keep the lights on and keep the bills paid - mostly our own. I've been operating on the assumption for the last few years that we're entering a post-industrial era for journalism. Mass media has been fragmenting for decades now, and the internet is only part of that fragmentation. I actually don't worry about journalism. It will get done, but as someone who is a journalist and has many friends in the business, I do worry about how the journalists make the transition. We will have a lot fewer professional journalists. That much is obvious. That doesn't necessarily mean we'll have less journalism. But I think Clay was pretty accurate in that we're in the middle of this revolution and the answers aren't all clear. But Dave, taking a swing from the barricades at the profiteering publishers sounds lovely but it comes close to ignoring the pain and economic dislocation that journalists are going through at the moment. We're not the only ones hurting in this recession, but reporters are going to have difficulty replacing their income in this recession from their previously full-time jobs with a totally digital model that is still in the making. best, k - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
