Digitizing the News

As I used to edit a completely obscure, now-defunct webzine, I really enjoyed this text and identified with a lot of the issues discussed in various ways throughout the work. I did feel that it was difficult to really grasp onto much of his argument as something that one could counter or argue against, so I'll keep this post limited to some general comments..

First of all, I feel that the 'distributed contribution' that Pablo discusses in relation to the New Jersey Community Connection truly is a sign of the direction where online journalism is going, as it moves further and further from newspaper editors simply copy/pasting their stories from print into Front Page and hitting 'Publish'. The popularity of blogging is just one example of this sort of concept, and I think that budget cuts in newsrooms will also make it easier for the production to shift more into the hands of the users.. The tools used to accomplish this and allow for the balance between producer and user will need to be tinkered with, but I think it's only a matter of time before this concept becomes even more "mainstream".

To a certain extent, I feel that the vicarious experience emphasized with the Times' Virtual Voyager is a concept on the way out. People are increasingly using the Internet to take care of everyday tasks and errands that they would have previously needed to leave the house for (for shopping, banking, etc.), or pick up a newspaper for, and I think that being simply 'entertained' by things on the 'net is becoming less prevalent. Some of the technology with computers has lost its novelty, and projects like the Virtual Voyager were definitely more of a reflection of the newness of a lot of these features more than anything.

With the first case study, I question Pablo's idea of what exactly a 'new journalist' needs to know how to do. Although I do realize that it is growingly important for journalism schools to instruct students on new software and technological updates, their primary role as reporters has not changed, and I feel like Pablo (and other scholars) might be expecting a bit much out of journalists that are still being taught mostly under the pyramid scheme-centered old-school of journalism. I do think that we are in a time of transition with this concept of the "new journalist" (as seen with some of the reluctance writers faced with reading feedback from readers), but that this is something that will take quite a bit of time before the shift is comfortably made.

Meanwhile, I feel that design for e-news ventures will, and probably should, remain for the most part within the "design for lowest common denominator" tenet Pablo bemoans (91). This reflects my view of websites as needing to be focused toward utility rather than razzle-dazzle, in order to be useable for the largest majority of readers possible, but I'm also likely biased because I was raised in a 28.8K modem household throughout high school, so I developed a strong dislike of graphic-heavy and slow-loading pages.