Brief writings, comments, updates and vignettes.
Our best hope for journalism is that it adapts to the Internet as a medium, by adopting a decentralized organizational structure, in sync with the Internet’s basic/essential architecture as a network. In the network, power and access are distributed, everyone’s equally capable and embedded in a peer context. Thus the enterprise of journalism should focus […]
Read MoreIt is a curious thing, in an era of revolutionary change in the media landscape, that journalists and editors have gained so little. The Internet has been a boon for citizen media. It’s like Neal Postman’s pre-telegraph America, the original media convergence of spoken word and written text. The Lyceums and Chautauquas, the newspapers and […]
Read MoreThe good folks at Free Press gave me a li’l soapbox on their SaveTheNews.org blog. I took the opportunity to mouth off about journalism institutions vs infrastructure, a familiar topic to readers of Illuminated Media. Here’s a teaser — read the rest on SaveTheNews: Institutions or Infrastructure? The Real Opportunity for Online Journalism and Democracy […]
Read MoreOnce shunned for its suspiciously reddish tinge, the word “cooperative” may have regained utility, and credibility, in the vocabulary of journalism business models. As the newly formed Chicago News Cooperative appears to demonstrate, it’s not just a way of organizing journalists when the traditional model is failing; it’s also a means for undercapitalized commercial media […]
Read MoreFrom the Columbia Journalism Review, a comment on executive pay and the startup-funding issues that confront small, nonprofit-news projects (such as my own Newsdesk.org endeavor): “Newsosaur Alan Mutter [noted] that Paul Steiger, the editor in chief of the non-profit news startup Pro Publica, earned a $570,00 salary in 2008. Mutter compared that situation to the […]
Read MoreBy Jeff Gerhardt, Ronin Geek [EDITOR’S NOTE: Gerhardt, whose early career found him helping midwife the Internet in its ARPA days, says that attempts to portray Net Neutrality as “socialist” are distortions of history. In fact, he writes: The Internet is by nature and intent open-source, peer-driven, fundamentally entrepreneurial, and thus Net Neutrality is as […]
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