Designing New Cultural Journalism
Web curating, filter failure, and conference wisdom
In a field that is notable for its competitiveness, the National Arts Journalism summit last Friday at USC Annenberg School reflected a selection of five models of "arts journalism" from 109 contestants. See my blog on the A2 home page for more on adobeairstream's mention at the event.
The summit itself raised substantial pre-game critique from the blogosphere as to whether it stuck to its own rules in selecting finalists, and whether indeed some of the model projects picked are actually journalism. Prominent arts blogger Tyler Green took on the contest for promoting what he called "infotainment" over journalism, in September.
Green, leaping off previous whitepaper work by key journalism personalities like Geneva Overholser and Clay Shirky, is advocating that arts journalism move to a nonprofit model.
With this point of view I substantially and actively disagree, as, in the realm of arts coverage, many of the same foundations that fund cultural activities would likely become those that also fund so-called arts journalism about them. And creating closed circles is never good for either art or journalism.
Interesting among the comment recorded in the five videos you can watch at the NAJP site linked above was the belief reiterated among the finalists that many new business models exist online. (Glad to hear that!)
Meanwhile debate continues about whether such nonprofit entities as programs linked to public TV stations or public radio reflect "sustainable business models," or are, as their tax status indicates, nonprofits with security-embedded associations to public TV licenses or NPR-affiliated radio. Among the group one new fancy online magazine appears, in the form of Flyp Media's project, funded by a venturer who said he is collaborating with Time Inc. and Fortune magazines on a new definition of "rich advertising." He didn't say anything about how long visitors are staying on the site, however, begging the question of whether his site's storytelling replete with audio effects replicating the chunky sound of pages turning is working for Flyp (pronounced, "Flip").
Rainey Knudsen revealed that her Texas arts mag, Glasstire, nine years old, operated on a $198k budget in 2008. Flavorpill's co-CEO asserted for his part that Flavorpill's network of cities linked into content production as arts calendars of editor's "picks" operates on multimillion dollars of annual revenue.
In the meantime, I spent the weekend in Northern California attending, for two days, the Online News Association conference where, in heady company among the founder of Twitter and the front-page editors of Yahoo! and HuffPo, I heard oft-reiterated a few of the new words and concepts that guide this strange but brave new world. The wisdom also held that the poor newspaper is already aged when it emerges with "yesterday's news." And that the challenge, as the Detroit Free Press deputy managing editor Steve Dorsey opined, is not to be rendered obsolete in a world where consumers don't even necessarily konw where their news comes from.
So, a few terms you might already know. If so, sorry. If not, here you go.
Content Aggregators. This means that a site is "aggregating" or gathering content from outside sources, and re-combining it. Saatchi Online Magazine which has been picking up Adobeairstream posts and videos is an example of a content aggregator, but one that also produces original content. Glasstire does not aggregate, but creates original content. The same goes for us.
Curating. Well, we all know what curating means in art terms but I never heard the word used so frequently as I just did at the ONA to define the new realm of formerly wire-editors at news services. OR: Go here for more.
Curating appears to be the new buzzword of major news organizations on the Web. As this art term conferring the idea of educated selection gets grafted onto the practice of major media in culling news, Web curating is also garnishing internal ripples about whether the information overload that is a function of a "post-Gutenberg economics" (pundit Clay Shirky's term), and that we all talk about regularly, has led to "filter failure". Shirky, an NYU prof, back in January said this: "The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor. And so there's no economic logic that says that you have to filter for quality before you publish...The filter for quality is now way downstream of the site of production."
Obviously (or not), what we believe we're doing here is filtering for quality by creating content, that is guided by our recognizing that a big hole exists for the type of coverage we're providing on the arts of the West. It's gratifying that Doug McClennan said about us publicly that we deserved mention, at four months old, in an international arts journalism context that had live listeners from schools like Columbia University and a satellite site in the country of Kenya.
Meanwhile, if the Shirky argument holds that "finding," not "searching," should be the response to the "filter failure" associated with Google and other engines on the Web (per his argument) not doing anything to filter for quality, some 2.0 genius with new APIs, mash-ups and other gizmos is going to come up with the billion-dollar plan to make more refined filters than we've got now. We'll of course be watching. If anybody has an idea for an art filter that would help cull out institutional listings from content from calendar material, well, jump on it. And, in the meantime, if you want to know what to say to your friend who works at the NY Times or Huff Po or the Santa Fe Reporter, or anyplace where print meets Web, ask him or her how the curating is going. It strikes me as an odd and possibly fearsome coincidence that, like the art world, the media world is about to be overrun by the so-called "curator class." And, if there is even an early-in-the-game comparison, what it might mean is that we all need to be watching out to make sure that filters for quality don't confer on Web producers new legacy crowns that suggest only a handful of sites are doing anything good, and shun the rest. That would be something the major media world should give a lot of thought to, as it emulates art terminology in an effort to suggest it is embracing "quality" standards.
Ideas, anyone?
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