In a lengthy report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism profiles the shift that's taking place in newspaper newsrooms (or, if you prefer, multimedia information centers) across the country:
Just shut up and watch.
Jeff Jarvis zeroes in on how to handle curmudgeons -- "get us past the growling as soon as possible and onto a substantive discussion:"
"You can always find reasons not to do things. Then fine, don’t do them. Far more interesting and useful is to explore what might happen if you do them. ...
We have an acute need to adapt journalism -- and especially newspapers -- to the societal changes brought by new technology, and to do that, we need the energy, optimism and willingness to try something new that comes with being young.
So you're Rip Van Winkle, journalist, and you've just awakened from your nap to find that the newspaper business is all upside down and the Internet thing is right at the center of the mess. Before you start bellowing, here are some things you're going to want to say, and why they're wrong. Read on and save yourself some embarrassment:
There's a lot of talk going around suggesting that community has somehow changed, fundamentally, because of the Internet.
I think that's wrong, but one reason may be that I've always thought of community as a social networking process.
Some great points are to be found in Mary Nesbitt's summary of new Readership Institute data:
"Reading customers aren't deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are."
Paul "Newspaper Death Watch" Gillin claims newspapers "can’t do much and they shouldn’t even try" to build community.
This is just thoroughly, thoroughly wrong, utterly self-defeating.
New data from Pew: "The Pew Internet Project's May 2008 survey finds that 73% of adults in the U.S. go online. 78% of adults have a cell phone. 55% of adults have broadband at home. Offline Americans are overwhelmingly over age 70, have less than a high school education, and speak a language other than English."
As I dig through the blowback on Jessica DaSilva's blog, it's remarkable how many self-righteous journalism dinosaurs are posting their (generally anonymous) opinions without troubling themselves to do any reporting or analysis. Scanning through these comments, I see these not-so-sage observations:
