Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy played host to a gathering of journalists and academics last week to discuss the challenges to the media due to digital communication technologies.
Real audio streams of the sessions are now available on the site. You can also read about the media and democracy panel discussion on Project for Excellence in Journalism website.
One of the panels looked at the future of news, with a presentation by Scott Anthony, who led the Newspaper Next project commissioned by the American Press Institute. Rebecca McKinnon has a good write-up of the session.
This is her take on the report:
“The thing is, this report still views news – and journalism – as a linear process. The news organization speaks, and the “consumer” and “audiences” receive happily – and even more happily when the newspaper has innovated and figured out how to meet their information needs better. What they miss completely is that media has now gone non-linear.”
The Newspaper Next report is available to download as a PDF file. To get the file, you have to submit your personal info. And once you get to the download page with the link, it says “PLEASE DO NOT PUBLISH OR DISTRIBUTE THIS LINK”.
This seems counter-intuitive to the nature of the web. Newspapers need to realise that they are not the gatekeepers anymore. The web is about collaboration and participation.
Surely newspaper executives should encourage the audience to take part in the discussions about the future of the media. Making the Newspaper Next report freely available and asking people to share it is a logical first step in this process.
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