Posts tagged with 'amanda michel'
Will there be a new demand for quality journalism?
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The rise of free content will inevitably continue. However, some content could become more expensive as well. Stewart Brand, a futurist who created Whole Earth Catalog, WELL and Global Business Network, famously started a meme in 1984, “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.”
Brand explained, “Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.” (more…)
Shifting Roles
The new competencies outlined in Chapter 2 will help media organizations succeed in the new competitive environment. As a result, traditional roles will shift and overlap. (To read more of Chapter 2 and see charts of the shifting roles, download The Big Thaw.)
These changes threaten many people’s jobs, pensions and familiar ways of working. Yet, organizations that can successfully make the transition will succeed. One of the reasons for the Boston Globe’s troubles stemmed, in part, from a lifetime job guarantee to advertising employees that prevent it from making staff changes necessary to survive. (more…)
Getting Serious About Community
Many people in the media industry talk about building community, but what does that really look like?
“It’s not enough to have a place where readers talk back—or the classic letters-to-the-editors pattern,” Clay Shirky says. “Rather it’s about providing a platform for readers to coordinate with one another. That’s a really radical shift because in part because it means you have to take community seriously.” In the past, journalism organizations had a deep bench with all the pieces under one roof, but a key competency for the new environment is deeply engaging with users and communities in a way that is also scalable. Independent media could build large-scale communities by building a shared platform across publishers. (more…)