clay shirky reporting:
...We have long since entered a period of hybridization — William Bastone quitting The Village Voice to found Smoking Gun and Nate Silver selling fivethirtyeight.com to the NY Times, Andy Carvin and Anjali Mullany
pioneering new forms of live coverage from inside traditional
organizations, Amanda Michel’s career implementing citizen journalism at Huffington Post, then at ProPublica, then at The Guardian,
these are concrete demonstrations that the old dichotomies of
traditional vs. new media, professionals vs. amateurs, incumbents vs.
insurgents, have long since stopped being real, hard choices, and have
instead become points on an increasingly traversable spectrum.
...in a world where Wikipedia is a more popular source of information than any newspaper, maybe we won’t have
a clear center anymore. Maybe we’ll just have lots of overlapping,
partial, competitive, cooperative attempts to arm the public to deal
with the world we live in.
Some of the experiments going on today, small and tentative as they
are, will eventually harden into institutional form, and that
development will be as surprising as the penny press subsidizing
journalism for seven generations. The old landscape had institutions and
so will the new one, but this doesn’t imply continuity. We still have
companies called Western Union and ATT, but as the communications
landscape changed, they have become almost unrecognizably different from
their former selves. Likewise, as the presses fall silent over the next
ten years, even papers that survive will see their internal
organization and their place in the ecosystem altered beyond our ability
to predict.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/12/institutions-confidence-and-the-news-crisis/
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