Entries for month: January 2011
Making the scarcity of quality journalism work for newspapers
18 January 2011 · By Kylie Davis
The internet and mobile technology is supposed to have given us the 24/7 news cycle, which you would think would dramatically expand and increase our ability to break and expose genuine news as well as increase the demand for good journalism.
But with the exception of major breaking news events — including acts of terror, or in Australia, major bushfires and this summer, major flooding — what we really have on most days is two hours of genuine news and 22 hours of cheap-to-produce repetition of known facts, opinion parading as information, populist commentary, curated audience response and easy-to-whip-up outrage repeated ad nauseam. It's a hell of a lot of white noise.
The dynamics behind this goes to the heart of the flaws in our current business models.
Every day newspapers set the agenda, revealing to communities around the world what they will be talking about around the water cooler that day. But that agenda is being purloined by television, internet, social networking and radio news teams in the early hours of the morning before most of us have woken up. There's nothing really new in this. It's been going on for decades.
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