Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork
Thanks to Chris Corrigan for sending… “Have a peek at this. It’s Dave Pollard (in How to Save the World) on what the media should be: sCNN!”
The job of the media is to make interesting what is important. That was Bill Maher’s challenge to CBS’s Lesley Stahl on his show last night. He’s exactly right. What the legacy media do mostly now, an indication of lazy, cowardly, chintzy, risk-averse journalism, is try to make important what the lowest common denominator of viewers find interesting — irrelevancies like celebrity trials and sensational crime stories… So what are the media to do? Change the model.
1. If a news item is not actionable by the audience, it isn’t news and should not be reported.
2. News items should be long enough to inform the audience what needs to be done.
3. Reports should be assessed on their position on Covey’s urgent/important grid, and only items in quadrants I and II (HIGH Importance, regardless of Urgency) should be reported.
4. The media should abandon the pretense of objectivity.
5. Every story should be followed up on a regular, scheduled basis.
…recall that newspapers started as broadsheets — partisan, single-subject reports cranked out by activists, and that at one time people were so engaged in long-term thinking that they flocked to meeting halls to hear advocates, philosophers, scientists, and writers talk at length about one subject, and then retired to the local bars to debate about what to do.
Now, think about the current model for online journals (blogs). Let’s see, we write mostly short articles talking about events we read or heard about in the legacy media, those articles are displayed in reverse date order, and after a week or so, they disappear into the ‘archives’ never to be seen again.
Never, that is unless they are chock full of good project ideas, like this archive could be, as we start to post news of the projects we know about where little individuals are making SmallChange add up. Send your news?
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