Posts Tagged ‘journalism’

Horizon scanning and the digital underbelly

March 29th, 2009

Gaynor Backhouse writes a great post about libraries, holding out for “a guided tour of the library’s digital underbelly”. My favorite part is her metaphor about horizon-scanning:

Horizon scanning is a bit like doing a jigsaw you’ve bought from a car boot sale: first of all, it comes in a plastic bag, so there’s no picture to guide you. Secondly, you can see from the myriad sizes of the different pieces that there’s more than one puzzle in there and, thirdly, you know, even as you are handing over your money, that you won’t have all the pieces to complete any one, particular puzzle. [JISC Libraries of the Future | Holding out for a hero: technology, the future and the renaissance of the university librarian.]

Gaynor manages JISC’s TechWatch, keeping up with tech trends for libraries.

I’m not quite sure what the library’s “digital underbelly” is. But this sampling of news art strikes me as one possible example.

Graphics section of the Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1938

Graphics section of the Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1938

The Art the Message: The Story Behind the Chicago Tribune Collection has the same feel of the behind-the-scenes tour Gaynor Backhouse described: “secret stuff” that only the curators know about. This collection was saved by Janet A. Ginsburg, who edits news aggregator trackernews.net and curates a collection of news retrospectives, hosted at her personal site.

For access to the physical collection (now known as the Janet A. Ginsburg Chicago Tribune Collection of the Michigan State University News Archive) contact MSU Communication professor Lucinda Davenport. Images from Janet’s news art exhibit can also be seen at Brainpickings and (with Portuguese commentary) at Segunda Língua. Found via Janet’s comment on Steven Berlin Johnson’s SXSW talk, Old Growth Media And The Future Of News.

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Posted in library and information science, old newspapers | Comments (0)

Somebody’s Got to Pay (for Investigative Reporting)

March 7th, 2009

Timothy Burke is my new hero. The death* of newspapers, he says, is a problem mainly because somebody’s got to pay for investigative reporting:

We don’t need newspapers to have film criticism or editorial commentary or consumer analysis of automobiles or comic strips or want ads or public records. It might be that existing online provision of those kinds of information could use serious improvement or has issues of its own. It might be that older audiences don’t know where to find some of that information, or have trouble consuming it in its online form. But there’s nothing that makes published newspapers or radio programming inherently superior at providing any of those functions, and arguably many things that make them quite inferior to the potential usefulness of online media. So throw the columnists and the reviewers and the lifestyle reporters off the newspaper liferaft.

So it comes down to independent, sustained investigation of public affairs. The argument that online media cannot provide this function comes down to money

Burke gives more details and examples, and calls for new funding models, including philanthropic and/or foundation money. He concludes that the “The end of the newspaper model of the last century doesn’t have to be the end of independent investigative reporting.”

Go read the whole thing.
*It seems like death and rebirth, to me, especially with some major newspapers reinventing themselves online. But that’s another matter.

Burke first came to my attention last year, from a talk he gave to the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control at March’s meeting on the Users and Uses of Bibliographic Data. Burke represented and reflected upon the user perspective, as an academic who searches catalogs outside his area of expertise.

Via John Dupuis’s friendfeed.

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Posted in future of publishing, intellectual freedom | Comments (1)