20 Post-it Provocations on Media
Recently, I was asked to open an unconference with students and grads from our News Innovation and Leadership program at Newmark. I was also preparing for a Newsgeist unconference (which I unfortunately had to miss). Thus my mind has been its own unconference; I sneeze Post-its. So, for our event, I decided to present 20 provocations for discussion about news and media as virtual Post-its (that is to say, tweets):I’m thinking about the half-life of media forms. Magazines are going out of print. Studying the form, I’ve come to see how evanescent any publication can be and perhaps so is the genre. Television is in shambles as the institutions of prime-time, networks, linear television, broadcast, and even cable fade. Recently, The Times had a story about the unsustainable resource and risk it takes to make a best-seller. And the death of the print newspaper has been oft foretold but might finally be upon us, for it is fast becoming unsustainable. Nothing is forever. So what might follow? Journalism is unprepared to cover institutional insurrection. News organizations still seek balance, fairness, sanity, tradition, and the establishment and enforcement of norms, while much of the country seeks to tear down the institutions of society — journalism, science, education, free and fair elections, democracy itself. As Jay Rosen points out, we have no strategy for how to cover this coup. Should journalists be educators? Educators deal in outcomes, telling students what they will learn, teaching them that, and asking whether they learned it. What if journalism aimed for outcomes — such as reporting why people should get vaccinations or vote or believe election outcomes — and judged its value and success accordingly? Then do we become advocates? Activists? Propagandists? At a gathering of internet researchers we convened a few weeks ago, one of the academics asked whether all propaganda is bad. If the bad guys use it, should the good Internet leadership. I’m turning my attention from news leadership to internet leadership. For I think we in journalism need to broaden the canvas upon which we work past stories, content, and publications to the connected society and its data. What should we then we teaching in journalism schools? What of the humanities and of ethics and historical context should…
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