Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Sry
about the lack of updates. Shiz is getting real.
For the time being:
This is, to an extent, what I imagine THE FUTURE OF GERMANALISM looking like.
The article also addresses the paradox of ad revenue - while such "hyperlocal" sites would give advertisers an ideal environment for targeting specific consumers, they don't have the scope of broader publications.
But something's gotta give. Eventually, social exhaustion will set in for some of those trying to keep up with the news of the day - I know that's been the case for me. When everything is emphasized, important items lose meaning while trivial events/memes/etc become our culture.
OK.
What this article suggests, and what I'm advocating, is a return to emphasizing the local. This is not to detract from the significance of global events, but in recognition that we are humans, not information aggregators - we care about what directly affects us.
We can empathize with that which does not affect us, but, at the risk of sounding cynical, empathy carries little weight when not backed up with cold hard cash.
For the time being:
This is, to an extent, what I imagine THE FUTURE OF GERMANALISM looking like.
The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments. “Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.”This is not to say blogs like Outside.in, Patch and their ilk are an absolute beacon of hope for journalism. The problem of accuracy on blogs still exists, but as they grow in number and popularity they are also held more accountable.
The article also addresses the paradox of ad revenue - while such "hyperlocal" sites would give advertisers an ideal environment for targeting specific consumers, they don't have the scope of broader publications.
Still, said Peter Krasilovsky, a program director at the Kelsey Group, which studies local media, many small businesses have never advertised outside the local Yellow Pages and are an untapped online ad market whose worth his firm expects to double to $32 billion by 2013.It all comes back to the Texas/Maine quandary that anyone who's taken J201 will know all too well, which was posed by Thoreau in Walden and adopted by media guru Neil Postman:
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.The trend with NEW MEDIA seems to be a consistent broadening of butterfly effect ideals - if something happens somewhere, it has an impact on everything else everywhere.
But something's gotta give. Eventually, social exhaustion will set in for some of those trying to keep up with the news of the day - I know that's been the case for me. When everything is emphasized, important items lose meaning while trivial events/memes/etc become our culture.
OK.
What this article suggests, and what I'm advocating, is a return to emphasizing the local. This is not to detract from the significance of global events, but in recognition that we are humans, not information aggregators - we care about what directly affects us.
We can empathize with that which does not affect us, but, at the risk of sounding cynical, empathy carries little weight when not backed up with cold hard cash.
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