On journalistic oversupply
Michael Parekh:
So, there aren’t any fast-acting, silver-bullet solutions for newspapers. Just, slow, painful evolution to a “right-sized” organization and business model. Like industries have done in the face of technology-driven change for a countless years.
Tags: journalism, oversupply
July 22nd, 2006 at 2:28 pm
I saw a snippet of chitchat on the Internet over the past weeks, can’t remember when or where, but the snippet may have contained an insight that’s fourteen steps ahead of the rest of the pack: it was merely and simply that one day if we are all reporters we will be writing for nothing, for free, and Samuel Johnson’s remark about only blockheads writing for free will be completely turned on its head and that will be good, because the reporters that aren’t in it for the geedus will hang in there and the dilettantes, the non-truthseekers, will leave the field full of people who would work for nothing. I told the head copy boy at the Miami HErald I would work for nothing and he looked about and said, “Shhh, Mac, they’ll hear you.” Well, they can hear me know and I still mean it, let’s all be like poets and do it for the love and if a few bucks come our way,l be grateful for small, preferably small, favors. Al, Hallowell
July 22nd, 2006 at 2:33 pm
“there aren’t any fast-acting, silver-bullet solutions for newspapers. Just, slow, painful evolution to a “right-sized†organization and business model.”
*cough*
An intriguing thesis … you’re going to expand on this?
Somewhere in my blizzard of bookmarks there’s a cluster of sites dealing with this … I had started to write something along the lines of “There’s still reason for optimism”, where I explored the notion that increases in both velocity and volumen doesn’t necessarily mean a decrease in quality. I’m still working on it. Got any ideas for a good tag?
