But if the author of the news story, or opinion piece, or blog post, tends to the comments, replies to the good ones, signals the bad ones, chastises the loudmouth bullies, and generally runs the comment threads like a serious discussion group, a serious discussion will result.
I have been saying this for years! Thank you Fred. This is how online journalists should work!
I’m not pretending to be an expert on the details of exactly how newspaper companies should adapt. But you don’t have to be an expert to notice the obvious. Newspapers are losing millions of dollars. New, online-only publications, on the other hand, are operating at a profit. And there is a stark difference between the two: new online publications are lean and mean. They are small, flat organizations where most of the employees are producing actual content.
Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business. Look at iTunes: if people paid for content, then it would follow that better content would cost more money. But every song costs the same. Why would people pay the same price for goods of (often vastly) different quality? Because they’re not paying for the goods they’re paying Apple for the service of providing a selection of convenient options easy to pay for and easy to download.
At its core, ChicagoNow appears to be an effort to create a new kind of local site by aggregating and curating local bloggers, staff material and other content, with a heavy sprinkling of social features, mobile options and other goodies.
That’s why we need to regard blogs and microblogs as flow, not as regular media. Limiting ourselves to just follow a predefined set of blogs (just as we follow newspapers, tv-channels etc) is an inadequate way of consuming this new media.
I feel smart carrying a newspaper, dumb while using the web, and like an ass using my iPhone in public. Score one for print media?
