I was just wondering, as this is my first time commenting here, howcome all our IPs are publically displayed?

Beth Beck
copy editor/page designer
http://beckelizabeth.wordpress.com

I would agree that some of the promises were a bit much — or at least they were talking about a world that is still years away. Measured against the most grandiose predictions, the results to date are thin.

But measured against the past, I’d say an awful lot of progress is evident on the Web — from Wikipedia to Google Search to database journalism tools to original source posting, microlocal site development, sprawling information choices for consumer, and so on.

In any case, over-excited new-media prophets aren’t the villains here. The villain, if there is one, is the challenge of starting anew in figuring out how a robust environment of news and information can be created. I’d actually call it an energizing and unifying challenge.

Katherine Warman Kern
@comradity

Sometimes fundamental shifts occur without much fanfare because the tumult gets in the way. I think this is one of them. For a long time there has been a big divide in the news business. One side believed the Internet was going to be a disruptive force that would wreak havoc in legacy media. The other side said no. You folks in the new-media world are all wet; the digital revolution won’t dislodge the publishing and broadcast news businesses from their current business models. An awful lot of broadsides have been launched over the last 15 years over that split.

This is the war that is over, and where a fundamental shift has occurred. We journalists got dug in on one side or another of this proposition, and it became the dominant framework through which we saw, or feared, or eagerly awaited, the future. Now the proposition is gone. That the Internet will massively disrupt the news and information business is fact. Only its dimensions are unknown.

So now where we are? Turns out we’re all in the same boat. We meaning we journalists — old media, new media, media currently being invented. The dominant framework that governs us now is a confounding one but not a divisive one. Which is: None of us knows how news and information in the public interest will be sustained in the future. Nobody. Not Rupert Murdoch, not Jeff Jarvis, not Steven Brill, not Clay Shirky. As Shirky says, this is a question that is likely to be with us a long time, and probably will be frustrating and maddening and full of setbacks.

But it will be one that also binds us as journalists. This reality of common cause has been under way for a while now, and it has many manifestations — not to mention the many ONA awards won by mainstream media (as the commenter noted above). And it will strengthen because the new framework not only represents the reality that all of us are in the same struggle, but also that we share the same core values of news and information in the public interest. (A hat tip, by the way, to those who have never let those core values out of sight.)

As the comments suggest, this doesn’t mean we quit disagreeing. On the contrary, lively and heated disagreement is an important way progress has come, and will come. There are also, lest we forget, a lot of wounds at the heart of many of these strong voices. Tens of thousands of journalists have lost their jobs and there’s more of that to come. On the other side, it’s worth noting that some of the clearest Internet visionaries spent years being derided by mainstreamers. Payback time? Sure, some.

But again, the old lines are fading away. Look at the New York Times to see what the mainstream leader of us all thinks about the Internet. Look at Steve Buttry at the Cedar Rapids Gazette to see what a small Midwestern paper can do on the innovation front.

As for the new-media leaders, have you noticed that they’re not using the heavy artillery the way they used to? I think more have been taking Dave Winer’s wonderful advice: Focus on the beauty. (OK, I don’t expect Jarvis to mothball his howitzer, but far more important is the work he and CUNY are doing on the new business models front. Things are getting modeled and measured and progress is afoot.)

Some day we’ll look back at this period and see a news business beginning anew. We’ll see an awful lot of failures, and they’ll come from media we used to call old and media we used to call new. It’ll be a scrappy and fractious time, but at the core it’ll be a time when journalists with shared values were working on the same project — trying to find new ways, better ways, of spreading news and information that democracy needs in order to breathe. In a perverse way, the idea of journalists starting over, building a new future, is itself a thing of beauty. Look out, tribal loyalties. A bigger idea is in town.

EXACTLY (and I’m “New media”…for a newspaper)

The old media have lost because their income streams have been destroyed and their capacity to report is a fraction of what it was.

But the new media have lost too, because for all their talk about new ways of reporting, the best online news is being done by the old media guys in new media clothes. YouTube is full of TV clips, news sites are full of newspaper reprints.

Online social media is proving a wonderful source of gossip, but there’s a gulf between gossip and news, and that’s what we’re in danger of losing altogether.