In light of this week's demise of the print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, everyone is pondering the future of news media. It turns out there are actually some interesting possibilities developing.
I must admit, I was initially rather disappointed to hear the story. I've been aware of the print-news crisis for quite some time now, and have tended to (conservatively) frame it as the negative result of the dominance of television 'news' or blogs, or of Americans' short attention spans and laziness in general. I held pretty fast to the notion that newspapers are our only accepted (read: credentialed), viable option for critical public discourse. After all, don't all blog posts eventually trace back to some actual reporter's story? Further, how do we know which bloggers to trust?
While I still view this whole development as a pretty momentous historical shift, after hearing of the new online implementations at the PI, I'm excited to see what arises out the situation. Apparently the PI is getting rid of the model of specialized reporters and editors, instead training everyone to do some combination of tasks. More interestingly, though, they're making use of Seattle's wired population (and I don't necessarily just mean the amazing coffee here) to source certain aspects of the news. This means finding and vetting blogs and linking to them for crucial information.
To me, this last point highlights at least two important elements of the new system. First, there is a potential shift from authority to critical thought (for lack of a better term). As one PI worker who has stayed on through the online shift put it, trust is now earned rather than assumed, both on the part of bloggers and news reporters. Of course (and here is really the crux of the issue), this assumes that there are readers capable of investing trust, that is, able to think critically about what they read, and to use multiple sources to arrive at an understanding. Not that this hasn't been assumed (falsely or not) in the past; but it's no longer sufficient to simply say that one read something in such-and-such a newspaper.
A second aspect of the online shift has to do with location and community. Online presences, as the aforementioned woman from the PI stressed, are not simply virtual. While we are getting more and more of our national and international news from online wire feeds and aggregators, and are 'connected' globally in this virtual sense, newspapers (online or off) have a concrete, geographical presence. Furthermore, so do blogs: bloggers live in real places, and often post about local events and ideas. One way to get local information, then, is to source many voices directly, and to favor those blogs that consistently present reliable and helpful information. And this, I would assert, is not so different from the antiquated notion of the man-on-the-street reporter in the town square (it's just that we don't have town squares, and no one talks to anyone on the street).
An exciting prospect, then, is that the local/regional news site becomes something of a local source collector, in which the reporters can present a story based not the their qualifications as experts, but on their combination of perspectives, which the reader can always check themselves. The problem, naturally, is that this assumes a broad connectivity, literacy, and critical ability on the part of the population.
