BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, March 28, 2005
RE-IMAGINING THE NEWSPAPER.
Today's Globe carries an AP
article on the experiment
under way at the Greensboro News
& Record, in North
Carolina. The idea is to use blogs and interactivity to re-invent the
paper as an ongoing conversation with its readers rather than the
traditional one-way street.
Jay Rosen has written voluminously
about Greensboro on his PressThink
blog. You'll find a reasonably good introduction here.
You might even stumble across a skeptical comment or two from me. It
strikes me that one potentially huge stumbling block to all this is
that it presupposes intense participation on the part of readers -
and one of the biggest problems the news business faces is that so
many people are pressed for time.
Still, this is obviously a
worthwhile experiment and bears watching.
APPLE V. BLOGGERS. John
Mello quotes me in this
TechNewsWorld piece on
Apple's lawsuit against bloggers.
THE WRONG TEST. Los
Angeles Times media columnist David Shaw argues
that shield laws protecting journalists from having to give up their
sources should not include bloggers. To which I say, of course, not
all bloggers. The test should be not who's a journalist, but
who's engaged in journalism. Shaw writes:
Given the explosive growth
of the blogosphere, some judge is bound to rule on the question
one day soon, and when he does, I hope he says the nation's
estimated 8 million bloggers are not entitled to the same
constitutional protection as traditional journalists - essentially
newspaper, magazine, radio and television reporters and
editors.
Shaw's use of the semi-phony eight
million figure is the giveaway. Yes, by some
counts, there are eight
million or more people with weblogs out there. But surely there are
only a few dozen to a few hundred trying to engage in anything even
remotely resembling journalism. A judge well-versed in media law
should be able to figure out who's doing journalism and who isn't.
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
