“The Future of Journalism is Written in Neon”
That nifty phrase was written by former L.A. Times metro editor and columnist Bill Boyarsky in his profile, of Neon Tommy – the USC-based digital publication I direct. It’s a very flattering piece as the veteran Boyarsky, as thecase with most veteran journos, is pretty damn skeptical about the future of news.
I understand. But as soon as he met our student reporters he was immediately infected with their optimism and energy. Just as I am every day when I arrive at work. Journos of my Boomer generation spend endless hours in conferences wanking about ‘The Future of Journalism.” These young folks are too busy actually creating it right now to worry so much.
I’d like to ask you to take a few minutes out to read Boyarsky’s piece.
And then I want to ask you to show some support for the work of these students by simply subscribing to Neon Tommy’s Twitter feed and by becoming a fan of ifs facebook page by clicking the icon below. We’re almost at 1,000 fans. Help us get there.
Your support means a lot.
Thanks.
April 15th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
I agree that Neon Tommy is a great site. But as a fellow Boomer (61) I am resisting twitter and facebook signups or even RSS feeds. They just seem too demanding of attention. I would rather just read stuff when I feel like it.
April 15th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Och, what an orchid Bill Boyarsky wrote. High praise, indeed. And, deserved. I assume you saw this Clay Shirky piece, Marc.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/
Seems to me your students are just the folks to usher in the collapse to simplicity Clay spoke of.
April 15th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
There has been some comment about trolling on Marc’s site recently. I thought I’d trot out this piece:
http://quandyfactory.com/blog/54/shared_awareness_a_better_way_to_manage_comment_trolls
which is about mechanisms to moderate trolling. Despite his many wonderful qualities, I doubt our host has time to dork with this. But it seems like an idea worth keeping in mind. Maybe one of those Neon Tommy nerds has time to build it?
The point is that the phenomenon of trolling is generic in online forums, and that it can be moderated by purely technical means. Not censoring or threats.
A rating strategy like this has been effective on reddit and other sites. I was pointed to the above post on a blog called Hacker News (HN for short) which uses similar karma points — its subject matter is totally unrelated to Marc’s site of course. Here’s the link to the HN discussion of the above post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1269343
I put this link in for an indication of what a real online discussion can look like. I think there are some knowledgable commentators here, but the signal-to-noise ratio means their ideas are buried. Imagine if the discussions here had some of that thoughtfulness.
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