future

This blog entry is on point. And gutsy -- it's written by a reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News, which is owned by Knight-Ridder (which also owns our beloved Star), and it actually takes a few smacks at the corporate ownership.

What's great about it is that the fictional part that opens the passage is probably the best prediction I've yet seen about the future of news. And I like it! It looks really cool.

I know I bash on the local paper here quite a bit here, but the truth is, I'm scared to death at the prospect of the Star or any other big daily paper going under. Grumbles aside, these papers still have the the only real institutional heft to carry the Fourth Estate forward in our country. Bloggers can't do it. Alt-weeklies can't do it. And TV news is racist drivel.

So this idea of the "norg" being a converged salon of information where folks can enter from whichever direction they feel comfortable, interact with the info, repackage it, share it with one another -- I think it's exciting.

This Attytood post reads in parts like a manifesto:

We prefer to talk down to the public rather than talk to them. Even at our very best – and there are many, many talented newspaper journalists in America – we are more likely to aim at wooing contest judges than at wooing new readers. And we have a knee-jerk tendency to defend our narrow world of messy ink printed on dead trees, when instead the time is here to redefine who we are and what we do.

We are, and can continue to be, the front-line warriors of information -- serving up the most valuable commodity in a media-driven era. But that means we must be the message, not the medium, and so we must adjust to give consumers news in the high-tech ways that they are asking for, not the old-tech way that we are confortable with.

Damn right!