Journalism is Burning Or How Breaking News is Broken

I wonder if the Journalism grad students are thinking about things like Dale Dougherty is musing about at Journalism is Burning Or How Breaking News is Broken. He starts with simple observations, then begins to imagine new ways that news could be reported and gathered by readers. Very imaginative. Where is it that scholars are studying these phenomena? I want to study them, because it's instrumental in the telling of the story about what's going on with cultural institutions that have acted as intermediaries when we seem to be able to do more and more for ourselves. Of course, I know there's always the information frontier, but still, libraries can't be unaffected by all that's going on.

So I wonder if the College of Communication is where all this research is happening. I'm taking a class there this semester on Research in Interactivity, Web 2.0, so I'll get to meet some of the Communication grad students. I could see looking at a survey of new forms of scholarly communication that emerge over a 3 year period or something like that (for example, MediaCommons and CommentPress, both if:book platforms). Watching the world change right under your nose. Looking at uptake in a specific community. Counting the numbers of alternative publications. Right now you can actually count experiments in alternative and interactive publishing in single digits. I doubt that will be true for much longer. It would be good to get on it right from the ground floor.

I would love to revisit things like this post in 10 years and see how it looks from 2017. It's curiously satisfying to look back at what you were theorizing, what you thought about where things were going. I guess that's one of the bonuses of writing down what you think. No way I'd remember it otherwise.