And a lively ‘net it is today:
- Update 1: Rethinking the Mercury News. It’s being reported as a bold step: the Mercury News in San Jose is going to reinvent itself by finding out what readers want. But it seems to me more not much more than a rerun of the focus-group-mad newspapering 1990s and we know where that led.
- Update 2: Media Consumers Finally Saying, `Enough Already!’. A study suggests Americans have reached the saturation point for media consumption. Mildly interesting. Compare/contrast with Study: More time spent with paid media.
- Google News Adds Reader Comments! (well, kinda, but not really…). Lots of ‘net chatter on a new move by Google News, and Tish Grier’s is the best I’ve found so far. Update: Best headline on the story is Mike Arrington’s: Google News Announces Limited Comments. Everyone Needs To Calm Down.
- Bridge Collapse: Web 2.0. Hart van Denburg makes an interesting point in a short post that links to an indepth look at citizen journalism and the Minneapolis bridge collapse: “The speed of the transformation of the bridge collapse from tragedy to fully-produced and packaged TV news spectacle was remarkable. I’d guess it took less than 12 hours. Meanwhile, the contributions to Flickr number well over 7,000 at this point.”
- Journalism That Matters begins. There are a couple of good reports from the Journalism That Matters gathering that’s going on in Washington. The title link is to Len Witt’s blogging of the opening day. See also Clyde Bentley’s post, What matters, journalist?.
- Private radio profits rise, but problems persist. The problems aren’t for Canadian English-language, big market stations, though.
- Dead animals, large and small. Alan Mutter finds his web traffic gets a boost not from big media linkage but from a little link love from Saskatchewan. A tale for the modern age.
All right, so the readers of a blog run by a nasty racist in Saskabush who provides a steady stream of partisan snark, “MSM” bashing and a hangout for some really vile commenters are more likely to click through than people browsing Forbes. What fabulous progress.
@Tish: I think that the reason journalists haven’t fared well in fora is the double standard for what’s expected on comment fora: journos are expected to play fair, not get personal, not take on assumed names and othersuch; the same isn’t expected of their online critics. (By contrast, it is expected of letter-to-the-editor writers.) May be less of a problem with Google’s system.
Hi Mark–and thanks! There’s also probably some huge ethical considerations with what Google’s doing–esp. in the case of folks involved in lawsuits going online to “correct” something written in an article. And where does it put journalists? Will they be allowed to respond if their repoting is questioned? So far, journalists who respond on message boards/forums haven’t faired all that well.