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:
Jeff Jarvis has posted an "utter bullshit" spreadsheet (for discussion only, not to be taken literally) outlining how a newsroom might reorganize to save money and focus on its strengths. One of the notable line items was reducing the number of copy editors (subs, for you Brits) from 15 to three. "Make writers edit," he declared.
