Columbia J-School’s Existential Crisis — Daily Intel — New York News Blog — New York Magazine:

But the push for modernization has also raised the ire of some professors, particularly those closely tied to Columbia’s crown jewel, RW1. “Fuck new media,” the coordinator of the RW1 program, Ari Goldman, said to his RW1 students on their first day of class, according to one student. Goldman, a former Times reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as “playing with toys,” according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”

The Atlantic ponders the end of the NYT, and doesn’t see the sky falling. Nor do I. People will probably scoff at my attitude, but will the world be less whole if we no longer have print newspapers? I find it curious that many so-called media reformers idealize the heyday of diverse newspapers and a literate public, yet these memories seem largely hallucinatory. With the exception of rare investigative reporting that has done some social good, most newspapers have historically been large business that served mostly as stenographers of power, reinforcing dominant myths, not challenging them. However, though I lost my newspaper addiction long ago, I do sympathize with those who enjoy spending the morning with their Times. I don’t mean to be so flip, but newspapers are already off my radar. It think there are enough independent investigative and citizen sites to pick up the slack and do an even better job (as Katrina and Mumbai demonstrated). Nonetheless, there are some big losers in this scenario: ethnic newspapers and those off the grid. Yet I suspect if there is a market for niche papers, they will survive.

End Times – The Atlantic (January/February 2009):

What would a post-print Times look like? Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow The Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it. In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters—now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases—could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.

PS I’m reposting Epic 2015 above as a reminder of how prescient that video was about the future of media

The New York Times – Video Library – Magazine Playlist

Click the above link to see what I consider to be one of the coolest presentations ever using simple desktop tools (the content doesn’t much interest me). The potential for this kind of vlogging is incredibly appealing because it allows for addressing the audience via webcame while showing videos and documents. Brilliant!

This video is from the same feature story, the New York Times Magazine’s special issue on screens. It’s a video of kids gaming, which reminds me of Godfrey Reggio’s “Evidence (shown below), but with slightly different results. How would you compare the two?

Journalism too is becoming interactive, and maybe better

Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, says that “journalism needs to become a community service rather than a profit centre,” and is working on making this happen. As The State of the News Media puts it, “the worry is not the wondrous addition of citizen media, but the decline of full-time, professional monitoring of powerful institutions.” That, after all, is what a free press in democracies is supposed to be for.

Unfortunately, I think the Voice lost its relevance a long time ago. As much as I appreciate Ridgeway’s reporting, frankly I can get that point of view and information from reading The Nation (which I do regularly). Before the New York Press was taken over by a bunch of frat kids in love with alcohol, porn related storylines and their own snark, I enjoyed it much more than the Voice because at least my views would be challenged on a regular basis by Russ Smith or others. You could predict exactly the POV of the Voice on any issue, making it only its live music ads, film listings, astrology and political cartoons of any interest. Has anyone the nerve to tell the editors that no one can understand a bloody sentence written by its music writers? I don’t fucking care how many clauses with made-up adjectives and metaphors as deep as an outhouse pit you can squeeze into a paragraph-long sentence. What does the damn album sound like? English anyone?

Finally, what the changes confirm is the obvious: the “Village,” i.e. the late-great epicenter of international literati it once was, has gone the way of the rest of Manhattan and has become a mere shadow of its former self, a theme park of Bohemia and feeding tube for the Post-Ironic Village of Damned: Williamsburg. The Voice started as a community paper, and for too long it was a publication without a community. At this point it seems to me that the weekly could use some fresh blood. And so what if it is “foreign’” owned (Arizona might as well be another country), so is the rest of New York. Whether we like it or not, the City belongs to the world.

Of course I don’t like the fact that traditional media (such as weeklies, papers, radio and TV) continue to be conglomeratized, but rather than lament the passing of one mode of communication, let’s celebrate a new one: blogs like this and other networked-based communications. As a media producer and consumer, I have never experienced more exciting times (OK, the punk scene in the early-80s is hard to beat). Each age has its own signature, and the one-to-many model is dying fast. Welcome to the Age of Many-to-Many.

Besides, there are still some excellent local papers worth supporting. I’ll only mention the one I read religiously: The Brooklyn Rail. There are too many to mention here, but suffice to say, this is one reader who is not disturbed by changes at the Voice, as long as those creepy kids with psycho eyes from Village of the Damned stay on their own planet: Phoenix.

Media are in the business of self-defining their own reality and defining the “public.” They want us to buy into their self-importance. Of course they will be pissed that people stop reading the spun-out nonsense that fills space between ads. It takes me exactly five minutes to read a newspaper, and another five minutes to grieve for the loss of tree pulp that created it.

PS One of the fringe benefits of a declining print press:

Six Jobs That Won’t Exist In 2016, such as advertising creatives.

More News Outlets, Fewer Stories: New Media ‘Paradox’ – Los Angeles Times:

“A ‘new paradox of journalism’ has emerged in which the number of news outlets continues to grow, yet the number of stories covered and the depth of many reports is decreasing, according to an annual review of the news business being released today by a watchdog group.”