Capitalism 1, Democracy 0
Now that that Obama guy is going to be US president, Maureen Dowd has to write about other stuff. Her usual disdain is focused this time on the outsourcing of journalism jobs to India. The arguments against having the Pasadena, CA, news reported from India aren’t exactly elusive, and the comments on the piece demonstrate a general consensus on this being bad.
This isn’t an I-told-you-so, exactly, but I will observe that the precedent was set on this long ago. Newspapers operate in a capitalist system, and in the strictly economic sense that capitalists love to invoke, the importance of journalism to democracy or community or whatever else is irrelevant.
"If, as Michael Kinsley once observed, Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, then Gladwell is a young person’s idea of an old person’s idea of a young person."
From
NY Mag’s profile of Malcolm Gladwell, which (the source) is interesting if only because Gladwell is a writer for semi-rival NY mag the New Yorker. Actually, maybe not, since most of those NY mags have a masthead with some writers who tend to transcend the masthead.
Canwest cuts
My old employers, demonstrating their continued ineptitude and lack of understanding of the media business, have been forced to cut 560 jobs in Canada. This isn’t the first round of cutbacks, and it mirrors the 5 percent staff cut at Fairfax, the Australian media giant that is similarly out of touch with the times.
Cuts are inevitable, of course, but the lack of progress in adapting to new possibilities in journalism and new media suggests the smartest cuts would be at the executive level, where bungling, ineffectual strategies and general cluelessness are the norm. Have you looked at a Canwest website lately?
Interesting that this coincides with the debate between Rosenbaum and Jarvis over journalism’s fate. A zillion people have weighed in on this already, and it’s actually really boring, so my take, briefly, is that Jarvis is half-right: while the decline of journalism isn’t the fault of journalists, they must nonetheless take responsibility for where it is going. Canwest’s executives obviously aren’t up for that job.
Same old questions
Jeff Jarvis is compiling a list of annoying criticisms about the internet. His intention is to respond to them in a column, but the easy answer to all of them is “it’s irrelevant.” Why? Because the complaints isolate the internet as the location of problems that affect information generally. Lack of ethics on the web? Same with the real world. There’s junk on the internet? Have a look at the magazines next to the supermarket checkout. Bloggers aren’t journalists? What about journalists who are bloggers? Trying to distinguish the internet from “the real world” is a silly exercise. Information, disinformation and ethical frameworks operate independently of the labels we give our media.
More on NYT’s comments: the editors’ selections seem to be pulled from the pool of user-recommended comments, so they’re letting the users do some of the work. More interestingly, the editors are performing a task similar to the one used to select the letters to the editor in a print edition. But how much time do they spend? What are the criteria? Etc.?
Media strike
Journalists at some major Aussie papers walk out in protest of 550 job cuts announced by Fairfax. As New Matilda points out,
The problem is not so much the balance sheet - both companies still make a profit - as the inexorable direction of the consumption trend. The slow death of old media is a worldwide trend that cuts across languages and economies. It’s a slow-moving train wreck that has transfixed its own industry, with everyone from Slate’s Jack Shafer to Margaret Simons to the Columbia Journalism Review lamenting the coming apocalypse of newspapers, news and Serious Journalism.
Free laughs, part one zillion
Bored during the writers’ strike, comedians, actors and writers make sketches for the web. Seriously, the New York Times has published versions of this article for months - the hook here is the strike. But there are some good links: Asmaa sez the Fred Armisen stuff is worth a look.
