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Math and the new journalism
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by Dave Winer.
Last week I wrote a piece called Year Zero for Journalism.
Doc Searls, ever the phrase-turner, called it Journalism 0.0.
Jay and I call our podcast Rebooting The News.
Thinking of the new in terms of the old is not productive.
Wondering how we will continue to do what-we-always-have-done is not going to get us closer to the future way of journalism.
So.. What does this new journalism look like?
I was a math major, so I spent a few years in my early adulthood learning how to find true things about conceptual spaces. As you advance through math the world your thoughts occupy gets stranger and more and more unlike the space our bodies occupy. Turns out that was good training for a mind that has to grasp things like journalism with a completely different set of rules.
I remember taking a class in summer school in a subject called Real Analysis, that’s on the road to Topology. It was one of the hardest classes I took, and I got a good grade, at least for me (I was far from one of the best students in my class). The moment of truth was during an exam when I had to prove a theorem and I had no idea how to do it. So I just started out with something I thought was true, that seemed to be on the path, and proved that. Then I proved another thing, and another, and finally I could see how the pieces fit together and was able to prove the theorem. It was a shining moment for me, because I was the only student in the class who solved the problem. So of course I never forgot how I did it.
So let’s try the same approach to figure out what the first instance of Journalism 0.0 looks like. Let’s start with something we know to be true.
1. There are fewer paid reporters in Journalism 0.0 than there were in the past.
I think any reporter who has been laid off in the last couple of years, and there are a lot of them, many of whom are very smart people, can see that, pretty clearly. Today there are a lot fewer people working in newsrooms than there were in the past.
Now does that mean there will be fewer people doing journalism?
Why? Because we have an ever-increasing appetite for new information, i.e. news.
Do you think that appetite will go un-filled? (I don’t.)
So if Postulate #1 is true, and there will be fewer paid reporters in the new journalism, where will the new reporters come from?
That’s the question that’s been on my mind for the last decade, since I wrote How To Make Money On The Internet. That was almost exactly ten years ago. Where will they come from? Where?
Stay tuned for the next installment.
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I did a research project a long time ago on personalities and engineers. The company paying for the study was tops in their field and trying to find more of a guy we’ll call “Harry.” Harry was different than the other engineers. He sat in a little office off a warehouse far removed from where much of the company’s work was done. He was an oddball who happened to smoke, but he was so valuable to the company that they accommodated his wishes and put him where he’d offend no one. When the engineering team ran into a roadblock, managers knew to give the device to Harry and see what he could do. He’d shortcut here, add there, remove a couple of what everybody thought were key steps, and walk out of his office — sometimes days later — cigarette dangling, to pronounce he’d solved the problem. The other engineers would be stunned. “That’s impossible,” they’d say of his manipulations. “You can’t do that,” but he had. He never stopped to prove postulates; he simply moved where it felt right. It is the way of the creative mind.
I don’t think we’re going to fix what’s happening to traditional journalism through traditional methods, and I’m willing to let you and Jay work away in your back room and see what happens. I appreciate that you’ve chosen to do some of your thinking in public, because your mind fascinates me, and I enjoy trying to connect the dots. In the end, though, the mind is a pretty lonely place (exceptions noted), so the process can’t ever be as clear to the observer as the conclusion. There are a lot of people pulling for you. Have fun with Jay.
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howardweaver 1 hour ago
The fact that there are a lot of laid-off reporters does not prove that there will be fewer paid reporters in the future. At best, it may convincingly suggest that there will be fewer reporters paid by the same institutions that paid them in the past. It takes no account of evolution of those institutions.
Your conclusions may urn out to be right, but this postulate is far from proven.
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Really interested to see where Dave Winer goes with his analysis of the “new journalism”. Good reading.
