Gawker blawgged about a new survey by the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that would seem to indicate the dearth of people willing to pay for news.
What I find interesting about this is that this, like Wikipædia, is the logical conclusion (or progression at least) of the death of the concept of authority. When Wikipedia came along, a lot of the auld school angrily assumed that this Could Never Work because it’s not backed by an authority that carefully examines a subject and adheres to strict guidelines regarding some particular ideology or ethics, i.e. Not Lying. Since the intent of the *pedia is to accurately convey True Information, “Not Lying” would seem to be an advantageous strategy.We have pretty much the exact same situation with journalism and the publication and dissemination of news. Accuracy is the whole point, but we can now finally (re)acknowledge the idea that a story’s accuracy is only as good as the amount of corroboration available.The cool thing is that now we have more new means for corroborating information than ever, or at least new information—for instance, last summer’s Iranian election protests, in which hundreds of individuals acting on their own could post photos of real events as they transpired. In other words, we no longer have to trust a particular news outlet, as we can corroborate any particular claim with the claims of many other sources. In more other words, the Information Bottleneck has been drastically widened in at least some cases.
Now there is in fact Wikinews, which I hadn’t heard of until I just tried googling for it, and Indymedia et al., but what I’d like to see is a kind of rating system of corroboration; something that tallies how many people concur with the information in question. (But yes, I am aware of the millions of practical problems that would present, but in theory it would be interesting).
This process happens between people all the time as it is; it is how trust and reputation works. I suppose the obvious drawbacks to the death of traditional Authoritative Media is the availability of resources and drawbacks like language barriers. The NYT has the resources to send a journalist to some far away part of the world and trusts her to report back honestly about what she sees, in English. Someone living there could theoretically publish their own observations, in another language, and we would not have the benefit of inheriting trust from the already well-established medium.
Related Posts:
On Media and Authority
Gawker blawgged about a new survey by the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that would seem to indicate the dearth of people willing to pay for news.
What I find interesting about this is that this, like Wikipædia, is the logical conclusion (or progression at least) of the death of the concept of authority. When Wikipedia came along, a lot of the auld school angrily assumed that this Could Never Work because it’s not backed by an authority that carefully examines a subject and adheres to strict guidelines regarding some particular ideology or ethics, i.e. Not Lying. Since the intent of the *pedia is to accurately convey True Information, “Not Lying” would seem to be an advantageous strategy.We have pretty much the exact same situation with journalism and the publication and dissemination of news. Accuracy is the whole point, but we can now finally (re)acknowledge the idea that a story’s accuracy is only as good as the amount of corroboration available.The cool thing is that now we have more new means for corroborating information than ever, or at least new information—for instance, last summer’s Iranian election protests, in which hundreds of individuals acting on their own could post photos of real events as they transpired. In other words, we no longer have to trust a particular news outlet, as we can corroborate any particular claim with the claims of many other sources. In more other words, the Information Bottleneck has been drastically widened in at least some cases.
Now there is in fact Wikinews, which I hadn’t heard of until I just tried googling for it, and Indymedia et al., but what I’d like to see is a kind of rating system of corroboration; something that tallies how many people concur with the information in question. (But yes, I am aware of the millions of practical problems that would present, but in theory it would be interesting).
This process happens between people all the time as it is; it is how trust and reputation works. I suppose the obvious drawbacks to the death of traditional Authoritative Media is the availability of resources and drawbacks like language barriers. The NYT has the resources to send a journalist to some far away part of the world and trusts her to report back honestly about what she sees, in English. Someone living there could theoretically publish their own observations, in another language, and we would not have the benefit of inheriting trust from the already well-established medium.
Related Posts:
from → Commentary, Writing