At this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, we asked a group of media professionals to discuss how new platforms are transforming radio, TV, print, and digital. “I have always been a champion for old media flinging open its doors and allowing citizens to participate,” says radio journalist Jay Allison. Other panelists include Paula Kerger, Jon Steinberg and Alexis Madrigal.The Big Question is a series inspired by The Atlantic’s back-page feature.
Via The Atlantic.
The best essay answering this question, by the way, remains Clay Shirky’s Shock of Inclusion and New Roles for News in the Fabric of Society. Shirky wrote his essay four years ago, and yet for our local press in particular, much of what he wrote must seem like science fiction. They’ve no discernible feel for new media, for genuine participation, or respect for the superior work those forces produce.
On the contrary, for the local press it’s mostly a slow descent into weak analysis and mediocre composition. (There’s not a single newspaper nearby that’s not of markedly lower quality than when Shirky first published his essay. Simply producing Web-based versions of tired publications with a status-quo outlook buys merely a bit of time.) There’s encouragement, though, from established publications elsewhere that take the forces Shirky describes seriously.
In this there’s no alternative: it’s adapt or die.