What will things be like without newspapers?

Given all the bad news about the newspaper business, combined with an economy that is about to take a nosedive, will newspapers come out the other side? If the post-recession United States has lost it’s great (and not so great) papers, what will things be like?

I live in Seattle and I have to admit, if the major papers disappeared I don’t think I’d even notice. I read the New York Times fairly regularly but almost exclusively online. The only thing made of actual paper that I read is The Stranger and maybe the Capitol Hill News which appears in my mail.

I would feel terrible if there were no more NYT, it would seem like a huge loss. And yet… maybe it would be more of a psychological loss.

Thankfully NPR does not appear to be threatened because in their case “there is no substitute”.

Citizen Journalism Through Interviews

I wrote a post on the NousMedia blog today about The Collapse of the Media. The media is showing signs of collapse and may founder before it reinvents itself (see David WIner).

We believe that interviewing or Q&A may provide a new model whereby communities can mediate their own relationships with people in power or celebrities. By providing communities with the ability to ask questions of these people, to vote on the questions they deem most important, to allow them to be self-moderating… they can decide what questions need answers. Isn’t that decision what media is all about?

The “powerful” people (those holding important political or economic positions) can then answer the questions and can do so without a great deal of filtering and misinterpretation. Of course the community will then need to check that the answers they are getting are true. Based on current experience, there are always people willing to find out the truth of someones claims.

Is this the new model for journalism? Probaly not entirely, but it may be an important piece of it. We’ll be working on creating the tools to enable communities to access the powerful and mediate their own relationships. We expect that the existing media will have an important role to play in this process and that this fostering and management of the communities may be part of their new business model.

Interviews on KUOW

I am a big KUOW fan and have listened to them since I first moved to Seattle about a decade ago. For those of you who don’t know them, they are the University of Washington NPR affiliate and produce a lot of original content of their own. You can listen to them at KUOW.ORG.

Here are two things to check out:

First, is an open question to you about the challenges that Obama will face upon assuming office: Obama Wins – What Now?

On a completely different subject, is a great interview with Jenny Asarnow on Youth Radio.