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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, September 6, 2010 |
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Hyperlocal News: Keeping Abreast Of What's Least Important
The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments. “Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.”
Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone
The New York Times
New York
Empires of immense wealth and power dissolve, or disappear due to what may appear to have been inconsequential change that went unchallenged — unleashing unexpected consequences of immense force whose impact is felt over long periods of time.
Journalism: Processor of Information And Ideas
Journalism, that place in society where information gathering melds with analytical assessment and editorial judgment to become credible and useful, is under attack, under funded, and widely misunderstood. Weakened by profit-driven media owners, and oft misdirected technology, probative, relevant and credible journalism is in open retreat. In its place Internet technology is spawning a high tech, low value information collection, capture, filtering and delivery model irreverently described as real-time data dumps. Today raw data is hot. It is also largely useless — akin to the old joke about the sports broadcaster to told his audience,
Today’s Major League baseball scores were five to two, one nothing, nine to five and out on the west coast their tied up one to one in the seventh inning.
Knowledge, Fact And Value
Today anyone can set up shop on the Internet, offer some new or novel service, idea or data stream and troll for some unwary, unsophisticated, or unthinking user. Retailing, bartering, and processed data services ( ideas, music, video, commentaries, news, opinion ) have proven useful to large numbers of Internet users. Other Internet delivered services, such a personal communications and interconnection support are very hot today, but any or all of them can easily go away without warning.
EveryBlock -- Everything All The Time
All sources of information offer opportunities for innovative waves of content delivery absent filtering, rational value, logical foundation, intellectual content or analysis. One such opportunity being explored today are database dumps — services willing and able to deliver raw data in massive quantities relating to or about nearly any and every activity know the man. One branch of data mining and dumping is in the generalized news category by what are known as hyper-local data dump services. On such service is known as EveryBlock — a service that processes vast amounts of raw data and statistics that can be selectively delivered to end users based on profile, location or class.
Some may find the real-time nature of electrified data streams entertaining, but few may find them either useful, or anything more than a novelty. Entertainment, trivia, or immense detail about things that matter little or not at all constitute junk-food for the brain. No free nation can survive on knowing mostly or exclusively only what’s least important. Yet the collapse of probative journalism on the air, in print and online is opening an immense gap between what free peoples must know to survive, and what some want you to know.
Journalism’s Failing Institutions
Broadcast news has effectively committed suicide. America’s great newspapers are dying. Some, including the Chicago Tribune, have sharply reduced news collection in the face of monumental debt service demands. Newsmagazines are scrambling to stay afloat. The AP is retrenching even as member papers abandon their wire service subscriptions. Cable news now fills its day with opinion, talking heads, hyperbole, looping obsession du jour stories.
Journalism, or at least the media in which it once thrived, is under attack everywhere. Even the mighty New York Times is battling to remain afloat while it tries to figure out how to make money giving away its costly and valuable content. Whether its technology, public attitudes, or nervous advertisers that driving the changes in journalism makes little difference. Whatever the cause, journalism is on the run today — and for many, its running in the wrong directions.
Law Of Unintended Consequences
The 21st Century is unfurling new ideas, advancing technology, and creating new problems. Change is not an option in life. We do not get to vote on it, nor do we easily foresee its long term consequences. But not all change is random, for human society has it’s own power to change. Whether the changes that impact human evolution are random, natural or of human origins is of far less importance than understanding the law of unintended consequences.
Don’t Miss . . .
Every Block Zoned Data: EveryBlock
Outside In tracking: OutsideIn
Place Blogger’s Zoned Content PlaceBlogger
Patch Community Information Patch
Times change as do people, ideas, values and institutions. Inevitable as it may be, the history of social, economic and ideological change is pocked marked by instability, uncertainty, transformation and displacement. Only one of these outcomes is desirable — for transformation is essential to the evolutionary process.
Like it or not we live in a transformative age in which anything digital is accepted for being inevitable. Being connected is epidemic. Information falls upon us as a waterfall equally capable of sustaining life, or drowning everything in sight. Prior to ubiquitous and universal connectivity the information waterfall was fragmented, throttled, and largely nonthreatening. That has changed in the last decade as the information filters, fragmenters, dams and redirectors have begun to fall away — leaving each of us at the mercy of cascading information flow.
Electrifying information has consequences. Data as entertainment is especially dangerous on the Internet where rests vast computing power and what’s fast approaching easy and immediate access to all the information there ever was, or is ever to be.