Not everyone agrees with him but he is certainly one of the key voices in the debate, panic, clamour over how journalism should deal with the Party. Jeff Jarvis' book is part call to action and part rhetorical gambit. This week we'll look at what he said and what it means for the industry and... our jobs.
Your task before the session: Read (or otherwise engage with) at least some of Jeff Jarvis' book, What would Google Do? as well as his Blog. Identify two things that make you hopeful about your journalism career and two that make you nervous. Add them here. Another useful video here and for a succinct summation, check out Jarvis in the Huffington Post, here and see one of his latest postings here. And a piece from his Blog that links to an FT critique.
Jarvis has also posted the v-Book on his site:
Also this is useful for thinking about yourt projects: The future of business is in ecosystems
And, the latest profit figures from Google.
Josh Surtees Hopes Hannah Doherty:
Hopeful
Jeff Jarvis says that Google, unlike newpapers which own content, is simply a platform for others to succeed. It adds value to your work because it brings it to more people. It is also means that as a journalist your work can live longer than just the edition it was published in because it can be found online even if it is years old.
While the newspapers are currently at risk, journalism is not because newspapers no longer have a monopoly on journalism. Google want content to manage and are not fussy about its subject so there really are no limits to who/what can be published online.
Nervous
Newspapers are playing catch up. They had years to take advantage of all the opportunities the new digital age had to offer and they missed it, whilst Google grabbed it with both hands. As a Journalism student you may well be working for these newspapers at some point it makes you wonder what else will they miss in the future? Is this too big a mistake for them to recover from?
Jarvis talks about a new societal ethic where everything is public and information should be freely shared, although he is all for this, it does bring with it the problem of plagiarisation of ideas/work. Gregg Morgan: Hopeful Everything is being thrown up in the air but it has to land somewhere. There will always be news and I feel that I can be at the forefront of a new era. In some respects it is easier to be on the outside looking in at the moment rather than working for a big media organisation whose foundations are being gradually eroded. The politics of the Google and Jeff Jarvis sit comfortably with my own so at least I don't have to adjust my world-view like Murdoch et al Nervous Where is my cushdy Guardian job-for-life! Google is eroding the business model that has employed so many journalists. It is seemingly falling apart, see the Observer this week, and that is a little unsettling for my future career. Big media have the resources to fund investigative journalism, television has almost completely lost its way in the commercial in terms of investigative reporting and I'm worried the press may go the same way. Jarvis seems to lack of concern for the quality of journalism. Jarvis is so quick to demand access but at what risk? I understand it is inevitable but if writing is my talent then how am I to set myself apart? Karri Palts Hopeful. There now exists an ever-growing freedom to absolutely say or do whatever I really think. This suggests I can very easily become my own 'maker' without dependence on the success of something (a corporation for example) bigger and less humane than myself. Nervous. Fear directly linked to the positive: The absolute necessity of finding and knowing a niche. What if amongst the millions of voices I will not know how to be loud and special enough. In a way I am no longer competing against the other potential journalists of this education, nationality, sex, age, city or country,(or whatever other box i tick) but actually every single person with a computer and an opinion. Thus the idea of the old stability seems like a nice sweet comforting thought. Luca PisapiaHOPEFUL After having attended online the sermon of this old guy who reinvented himself as the prophet of the Starbucks generation.. I digit on google the words: Gordon+Brown+Tobin+Tax and in the first page appeared the results: Guardian (twice), Telegraph (twice), Times (once) plus 2 news websites and 2 blogs.. so 7-2 for the ‘broccoli journalism’.. It means that for what matters people look for the skilled and qualified newspapers.. even if they sound so ‘cashcow in the coalmine’.. NERVOU About the fact that in the wasp world taxes sounds like evil and not egalitarianism.. and so it is right to have your work founded by the private Knight Foundation whilst it is Stalinism to have state help.. But even if JJ foresee that ‘the future of news is entrepreneurial’ and ‘journalism is going to be sustainable is if it is profitable’.. I’m nonetheless positive.. the foundation of society remains the social division of labour.. long life to the journalist as social workers rather than entrepreneurs.. Martin RedfernI should be feeling confident about a future in journalism after reading WWGD? because, if the kind of lazy, uncritical, pseudo-propositions he puts forward in this text are enough to provoke a three-way bidding war for its publication, I will be able to earn easy money for old rope for the rest of my life. However, I am not feeling confident about such a future because the laurels on which he is resting seem to have more to do with serendipity than serious engagement, the former on which I cannot rely no matter how much of the latter I try to maintain, and because I cannot bring myself to casually support the slide away from sanity and social justice that his willingness to embrace market fundamentalism entails. To consider what he has to say about media in particular, I hope that the link economy's need for valuable content (which has been deposed as hereditary monarch and reinvented as democratically-elected president) will continue to pay for its production, even if that production looks less like writing and more like editing. On the other hand, I think there is a real danger that advertising revenue-reliant publication will lose its independence at the very least, and its critical vitality at worst, forcing most content creators to choose between life as servile lackeys and wilful obscurity. The idea that readers know everything they might need or want to know seems not so much Socratic as stupefying. |