Three contributions today to the ongoing debate about where we, the media, are heading. Two of them ask questions we all need to consider. Here's Steve Outing urging newspapers to let digital visionaries assume editorial control: "Given the state of decline of the newspaper industry, perhaps it's past time to give online leaders a chance to take the reins of newspaper companies and try out some radical ideas for publishing in the internet age."
And here's Michael Kinsley, in pronouncing the death of newsprint, predicting the emergence of a different, and possibly better, kind of journalism: "The 'me to you' model of news gathering - a professional reporter, attuned to the fine distinctions between 'off the record' and 'deep background' prizing factual accuracy in the narrowest sense - may well give way to some kind of 'us to us' communitarian arrangement of the sort that thrives on the internet."
Outing argues that most newspaper companies are still being run by people from the print side and his article is based on contributions from executives and staff on the new media side. Having granted them anonymity, he quotes their complaints and suggestions. Two examples: "Allowing print-side editors who have been damagingly slow to the new media dance to continue to run the show and call all the shots makes about as much sense as continuing to keep the operations (print and online) separate"… "Online staffs everywhere are viewed as change agents in an organisation, and they can make great progress with online editions. But they have no voice about how to change the print edition. And this won't change until someone makes the bold move to put an online editor in charge of the entire news operation."
There were also gripes about low staffing – "We need to double, at least, the size of our programming", said one - and about putting content behind pay walls. Overall, Outing concludes: "Obviously, there's a lot of frustration among new-media people employed at and managing newspaper online departments and divisions. Do they have all the answers? Probably not. But I got a sense from my little 'frank talk' experiment that some of the ideas and complaints expressed to me are being conveyed by online team members and managers to newspaper top executives - but they are largely ignored or resisted."
Kinsley also calls for newspaper people to do some hard thinking and warns them off their current negative views of a future without print. We are not "necessarily... doomed to get our news from some acned 12-year-old in his parents' basement recycling rumours from the internet echo chamber", he writes. But his message is that unless American papers take steps now to embrace new media they will sell the pass. Nor is he laying claim to how the new model news operation will pan out. "I'm not sure what that new form will look like", he says. "But it might resemble the better British papers today... The Brits have never bought into the American separation of reporting and opinion. They assume that an intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. And they consider it more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity."
And finally, here's Gideon Rachman in today's Financial Times warning us not to overplay the impact of political blogging. He believes that it isn't clear that "the blogosphere's influence on politics is all for the good." He writes: "If politics is increasingly shaped by the blogosphere, it will mean more power and influence for a sub-section of the population willing to waste hours trawling through dross on the internet. Blogging as a medium has virtues: speed, spontaneity, interactivity and the vast array of information and expertise that millions of bloggers can bring together. But it also has its vices. The archetypal political blog favours instant response over reflection; commentary over original research; and stream-of-consciousness over structure."
But it's his next sentence - a self-reflective criticism of his own counter-intuitive argument - that I enjoyed: "Was that last judgment fair? Does it really follow logically from the rest of the argument? I am not sure and I have no time to think about it further. I have to get back to my blog."
