Mindful that he is “riffing on the journalism of others”, Blade commends an excellent piece from The New York Review of Books by Michael Massing entitled The News about the Internet. Massing delves expertly into the topic vexing the media more than any other: how to survive in a world of “sharp plunges in circulation, the dizzying fall-off in revenues, the burgeoning debt, the mounting losses”. Reviewing various books, essays and key blogs, he examines the charge that the internet is a parasite slowly killing its host and assesses the way in which news gathering and reporting has changed in the last few years.
Blade empathises with two points in particular. In another guise Blade is an old school journalist, and as such he still struggles with the idea of long-form journalism online. He finds an ally in the form of Jacob Weisberg, the former editor of Slate, who says: “The one nut we’ve never fully cracked is how to do long-form journalism online. Doing New Yorker -type pieces on-line doesn’t work.”
But in another incarnation Blade is a serial blogger. He therefore understands where Massing is coming from when he writes: “Writers on the Internet are under constant pressure to post so as to keep the traffic flowing. Many who write full-time for Web sites complain of the Taylorite work pace and the lack of time it leaves to think or to work on longer pieces.”
Massing concludes by stating that what is going on in the collision of traditional media and the blogosphere is a “profound if unsettling process of decentralization and democratization”. However, he believes that “traditional news organizations continue to play a critical part in keeping the public informed”, and plans to cover two key questions in a subsequent piece, the first being whether ‘old media’ can adapt to the rapidly changing news environment, the second “who is going to pay for quality news and information in the future?”
If Massing’s next piece is as insightful and well executed as this one, it may achieve the same level of popularity as Clay Shirky’s notorious Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. And, Blade would wager, it’ll be especially welcome to the executives at Guardian News & Media as they ponder the future of the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper.
Apparently, three-quarters of people on the web use Internet Explorer.
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