To understand what went wrong with journalism and the WWW we need to go back a tad further than 20 years ago, to 1996 precisely, when the internet took a momentuous turn in opening up to...
To understand what went wrong with journalism and the WWW we need to go back a tad further than 20 years ago, to 1996 precisely, when the internet took a momentuous turn in opening up to commercial ventures. Enterprises flocked in, without the shadow of a hint on how to finance the deed, hence the bubble and the dot.com crash of 2000.
In 2003 though everything changed : Google was born.
At first a damn fine search engine, Google soon morphed into an advertizing mega-factory by using high-level computer science to identify and profile hitherto anonymous internauts, and delivering instant, tailor-made advertisements. Fakebook followed suite a few years later and went one step further in delivering tailor-made (mis|dis)information.
All this while fiercely resisting all attemps at regulations, which were timid anyway as our elected representatives were taken aback by this sea of change in the art of propaganda.
Simultaneously, Rear Admiral John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness lowered the standards of a citizen's privacy. I can only hope that those lowered standards helped thwart many bandits, but they sure help Facegle compile a dossier on each and every individual, a dossier richer and more actionable than what the Stasi could only dream of.
Since then, pre-digital medias have lost more than one-half of their revenues, an industial catastrophe on which they themselves seldom report, shy as they are of exposing their own shortcomings. Of course, this means that the newspapers let go one-half of their workforce, journalists and support positions such as documentalists, fact-checkers, proofreaders …
All in all, I'd say that this article, however interesting, is remarkably shortsighted, which is sadly ironic for a magazine that once published the seminal As we may think.
Good article about how the news business has (and hasn't) changed. Also provides some good context for the current spates of layoffs. Josh Marshall is a good source on these things as he is both...
Good article about how the news business has (and hasn't) changed. Also provides some good context for the current spates of layoffs. Josh Marshall is a good source on these things as he is both an old school journalist and founder of a digital news publication that is actually profitable.
To understand what went wrong with journalism and the WWW we need to go back a tad further than 20 years ago, to 1996 precisely, when the internet took a momentuous turn in opening up to commercial ventures. Enterprises flocked in, without the shadow of a hint on how to finance the deed, hence the bubble and the dot.com crash of 2000.
In 2003 though everything changed : Google was born.
At first a damn fine search engine, Google soon morphed into an advertizing mega-factory by using high-level computer science to identify and profile hitherto anonymous internauts, and delivering instant, tailor-made advertisements. Fakebook followed suite a few years later and went one step further in delivering tailor-made (mis|dis)information.
All this while fiercely resisting all attemps at regulations, which were timid anyway as our elected representatives were taken aback by this sea of change in the art of propaganda.
Simultaneously, Rear Admiral John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness lowered the standards of a citizen's privacy. I can only hope that those lowered standards helped thwart many bandits, but they sure help Facegle compile a dossier on each and every individual, a dossier richer and more actionable than what the Stasi could only dream of.
Since then, pre-digital medias have lost more than one-half of their revenues, an industial catastrophe on which they themselves seldom report, shy as they are of exposing their own shortcomings. Of course, this means that the newspapers let go one-half of their workforce, journalists and support positions such as documentalists, fact-checkers, proofreaders …
All in all, I'd say that this article, however interesting, is remarkably shortsighted, which is sadly ironic for a magazine that once published the seminal As we may think.
You forgot about Craigslist.
Good article about how the news business has (and hasn't) changed. Also provides some good context for the current spates of layoffs. Josh Marshall is a good source on these things as he is both an old school journalist and founder of a digital news publication that is actually profitable.