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BuzzMachine

by Jeff Jarvis

Bringing a friend to terrorYesterday

I haven’t written anything about the Mumbai terror because I didn’t know what I had to add and I couldn’t grasp the 60 hours of horror there. I did write about Twitter and witnesses taking over news and — though I wish we wouldn’t make 9/11 the touchstone for all terrorist crimes henceforcth — I could not help recalling my 9/11:

Ever since I survived the 9/11 attacks, and later saw the coverage the world saw - smoke spied from rooftops miles away - I have made sure to always have a camera with me, as the view of the story from the ground was so different from that seen on TV. Now I carry a mobile phone that can capture and broadcast text, photos and video immediately. If I’d had that then, the image I would have shared would have been the image I most remember - not of smoke and helicopters, but instead of black tear-tracks on the face of an African-American woman covered in the grey dust of destruction. Such will be our new view of news: urgent, live, direct, emotional, personal.

And then I read this column in the Times of India and realized that I had perpetuated the same mistake: I was seeing Mumbai’s tragedy from many miles away, rooftop and satellite high. Bachi Karkaria writes about the tragedy from eye l

Journalism learns to shareYesterday

Following the post below on CNN trying to unseat the AP…. McClatchy and the Christian Science Monitor just announced that they’re going to share stories from foreign correspondents. No money changes hands, just stories do. We’re going to see a lot more arrangements like this in a marketplace of original journalism.

No more alphabet-soup newsYesterday

CNN is heading 180 degrees in the wrong direction with its attempt to start a wire service to compete with the Associated Press, I think. CNN is just trying to amortize the cost of its existing coverage by reselling it and it may find a few clients. But I’m dubious because newspapers and news sites are canceling every syndication contract they can (I did that six years ago when I worked on sites). Yes, CNN might undercut the AP, but since it takes two years to cancel an AP contract - and because newspapers have an ownership stake in the AP and because there is volume and quantity there - I don’t see CNN taking over a critical mass of AP business quickly.

But there’s a much, much bigger strategic mistake at play here:

The syndication model is dying. As the content economy is supplanted by the link economy, reselling the same story over and over again becomes increasingly impossible.

What’s needed instead is an infrastructure to share and link to original journalism. Newspapers in Ohio are doing that now. Newspapers in the New York area have

The news and the Wal-Mart deathYesterday

David Carr is bang on assigning a share of blame for the Wal-Mart Black Friday death under the feet of a shopping mob to news media. I will disagree in degree about business vs. editorial responsibility. He sees the creation of Black Friday - and that horrible coinage itself - as a cynical business conspiracy to pump advertising. I wouldn’t disagree except that I’m never a conspiracy theorist, especially inside newspapers, which only conspire against themselves. I think there is also an editorial responsibility - importantly in local TV news, too - to do the same damned story everybody else is doing and everybody else did last year. Black Friday walk-up stories are in no way whatsoever informative; they are not news. They fill time and space. We thought they were just pap. But as Carr points out, their unthinking inanity can also be dangerous.

Media isYesterday

I’ve decided that media are is singular.

I came to that conclusion, unblogged, awhile ago because I saw the lines between media crumbling. I especially see this teaching journalism school. When I came into the business, we had to pick a medium for life (or at least until we went into PR). Now, every time a journalist does a story, she can and should pick from all appropriate media to tell it (and not just tell it, by the way). Today, still photographers shoot video with a still camera. Print reporters take pictures and make slide shows and shoot video. TV people write text. Magazine people make podcasts. And that was just the game of 52-card-pickup we began playing with old media. Now enter new media with data bases and animation and interactivity. What is Twitter? A medium? A conversation? Both? Yes. So how does one separate one medium from another? It’s impossible, I came to see.

Then On the Media called asking whether I fell into the media as plural or singular camp. Funny you should ask, I said. I was plural, now I’m singular.

Now Brooke Gladstone took this question from another angle as well: media as monolith. We complain about The Media. But I argued that media are is no longer monolithic thanks