Pro and Con |
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Dave Winer CEO, Userland.com We're returning to what I call amateur journalism: created for the love of writing, without expectation of financial compensation. This process is fed by the changing economics of the publishing industry, which is employing fewer writers and editors. The Web has taught us to expect more information, not less, and that's the sea change the Times faces: how to remain relevant to a population that can do for themselves what the big publications won't. The "dumb it down" philosophy forces all stories through too narrow a channel to serve the diverse world we live in. When the Times covers my industry, for instance, it seems to know three stories - Microsoft is evil, Java (or whatever the topic du jour) is the future, and Apple is dead. All other stories are cast as one of those three. Bored readers are looking for alternatives, but because the paper is limited in its number of writers, it can't branch out to cover other angles. My bet says the tide has turned: Informed people will look to amateurs they trust for information they want. |
Martin Nisenholtz CEO, New York Times Digital Readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate, and coherent. News organizations like the Times can provide that for more consistently than private parties can. Besides, the weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media: The New Your Times as been publishing individual points of view on the Op Ed page for 100 years. In any case, nytimes.com and weblogs are not mutually exclusive. We would like to extend our ability to act as a host for all sorts of opinions, and weblog technology might well be useful in doing so. After all, in countries whose citizens don't enjoy First Amendment protection, weblogs are run by people who'd be considered professional journalists in the US. In its six years online, nytimes.com has been a center of innovation, and it'll continue to be, incorporating weblogs and whatever else will enable our reporters and editors to present authoritative coverage of the most important events of the day, immediately and accurately. (Mr. Nisenholtz, you are full of "Barbara Streisand.") |