How Barack Obama brought a touch of web 2.0 to traditional community organizing.
Tag: new media
Printomortis looming
Bad idea is a hip magazine that I stumbled across via a post on Martin Bright’s Facebook page. It’s been going for years, so shame on me for only discovering their site this year.
As I sit in the newsroom of a mainstream news organisation plotting my escape route, independently run sites like Bad Idea represent a beacon of hope on a dark and gloomy media landscape.
Which is why I was mortified by their new online show Printomortis. The magazine is producing a drama micro-series following life at an independent magazine in the dying days of print. (Actually mortified is probably the wrong word because I love it as much as it scares me. It captures the zeitgeist so beautifully)
Witty scenes make you chuckle and grimace at the same time. Like the episode one in which editors Jack and Daniel talk to their one staff member about the looming threat of downsizing, ie getting rid off luxuries like an office and reporters.
It’s refreshingly honest and very informative but guys please, don’t throw in the towel just yet. I’m 100 per cent convinced that you’re too talented to ever be on a “one way train to some kind of cataclysmic career suicide”!
Boycott Buy a Newspaper Day
Don’t buy a newspaper, support online advertising instead!
2 February has set aside as Buy A Newspaper Day in the US.
Just last week, French president Nicholas Sarkozy announced a €600 million package to prop up France’s ailing newspaper industry.
The proposed measures include free newspaper subscription for 18 year-olds, paid partly by the government and partly by the publishers.
This is all utter madness! Why should taxpayers’ money be used to bailed out a flawed industry? What next? A bailout for porn too?
As one blogger wrote, in this split-second electronic communications age it can be argued that newspapers are relics from the “Stone Age” of news dissemination.
So rather than propping up a dead man walking, how about putting your pennies behind the potential offered by online journalism?
We’re not talking about the all-too prevalent rehashing of material that occurs on far too many news websites provide, but rather the sorts of publications that invest time, money and technology in creating original content, often in ground-breaking formats, online.
How can you make a difference? Support online advertising. Learn to love pop ups, click on links and sit through pre-rolls on videos.* You’re just one click away from making a difference!
Journalism in global crisis
Following on from my post yesterday, the issue of a journalistic crisis appears to be as much of as an ongoing story as the financial crisis.
In today’s Corriere della Sera, Marco Pratellesi, editor in chief of Corriere online, blogs about Italian journalists suffering from a cultural crisis and a rupture between generations. Apparently the same issues are rocking French newspapers too.
The Hip + The Square 