PRESS + DIGITISATION Thomas Jefferson quote

Great article on a photojournalist's chronicling of the stark decline of journalism as a profession; the focus is on the US (Philadelphia Enquirer) but there is sadly common ground with the UK. I also tackle the term 'disruption' later in this post, a useful one in the context of web 2.0, digitisation, UGC and suchlike...:

Steacy's artfully expressed study captures impact of digitisation

In the past decade, as a percentage, more print journalists have lost their jobs than workers in any other significant American industry. (That bad news is felt just as keenly in Britain where a third of editorial jobs in newspapers have been lost since 2001.)
...
The reasons for this decline are familiar – the abrupt shift from print to pixels, the exponential rise in alternative sources of information, changes in lifestyle and reading habits, and, above all, the disastrous collapse of the city paper’s lifeblood – classified advertising – with the emergence of websites such as Craigslist and Gumtree. The implications are less often noted.
Stephan Salisbury, a prize-winning culture writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer for the past 36 years, puts them like this: “Newspapers stitch people together, weaving community with threads of information, and literally standing physically on the street, reminding people where they are and what they need to know. What happens to a community when community no longer matters and when information is simply an opportunity for niche marketing and branding in virtual space? Who covers the mayor? City council? Executive agencies? Courts?… It is this unravelling of our civic fabric that is the most grievous result of the decline of our newspapers. And it is the ordinary people struggling in the city who have lost the most, knowing less and less about where they are – even as the amount of information bombarding them grows daily at an astounding rate.”

Here's the quote the post title refers to; one you could quote possibly memorise as a great way of developing the basic point that a 'free press' are the cornerstone of our democracy (or, at least, our democratic theory!) ...

Daily Mail and clickbait

A former Mail online employee has vented over what he sees as the base practices of the world's leading online newspaper site, allegedly shamelessly ripping off rivals content and rewriting this, knowingly publishing inaccurate content and misleading headlines, and above all employing clickbait as a central, core strategy. Here's a few snippets from Greenslade's column, worth reading in full (he always is!):

Excerpts below

BBC blasted by Culture Select Committee - new regulator?

THIS LONG POST CONTAINS:

• Analysis of the Culture Select Committee's largely scathing report on the BBC, which had many suggestions for reform of the BBC
• Details and analysis of media coverage of this, looking at how anti-BBC flak is formulated
• Specifically the issue of the BBC Trust: will it be scrapped in favour of a new regulator?
• Brief overview of some of the many other detailed posts on the Beeb

Wow - not a good day for Auntie Beeb; here's a flavour of what they face today, leading off from events yesterday; the Media Guardian's top 10 stories on the morning of 26th February, 2015:

The spectre of Sir Jimmy Saville raised once more, on of the low points in the BBC's entire history; a link made to tax avoidance, the political hot potato of this month given the furore over the HSBC tax avoidance revelations (and then the Telegraph ad revenue story); a clear growing consensus that the license fee must go (just not yet); and strong-worded condemnation of the BBC Trust, the current main regulator of the BBC. The Daily Mail will be loving this!

ANTI-BBC FLAK: THE MAIL'S GLEEFUL REPORT

BuffTheBanana.co.uk skewer Mail's hypocrisy

USEFUL TERM: CLICKBAIT - the practice of using celebrity names in article, or tags or images, to attract online hits. Provocative opinion pieces can also achieve this by attracting large numbers of (angry!) comments.

The language is a little crude, but the point is simple enough: the site seeks to explore what it sees as the hypocrisy of the socially conservative, pro-censorship, routinely morally outraged Mail and its extensive use of pornographic-style paparazzi shots. Here's the site's own description:

Buff the Banana with Paul Dacre is here to help you locate the most titillating content from the Daily Mail, without the fear of coming across something offensive.
Buff exists to show how Paul Dacre has exploited pornography to draw in readers. As Olivia Lichtenstein, the tabloid’s de facto erotica correspondent explains, ‘pornography today permeates society… [and] it’s addictive as cocaine’.
If you’re looking for good quality photos of celebrities frolicking in their bikinis or stripped down to the latest designer lingerie, Buff the Banana with Paul Dacre is for you. Many of the shots are candid, often taken ‘Peeping Tom style’ with a long lens.
Probably the most effective newspaper editor of his generation (read the biography), Paul Dacre is best known for creating a populist tabloid, famed for its right wing views and staunch social conservatism. But this is well documented elsewhere.
Under Paul Dacre’s leadership, the Daily Mail has worked hard to bring you the results of the ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ that so often cause celebrities to reveal a little more than intended – like a nipple. Visitors looking for something a little harder, should check out the upskirts. A little girl-on-girl action never goes amiss and there is often something for the ladies.

Clicking through to one of these, there was a particularly example of this willingness to use sexually titillating material, and even headlines, to drive traffic/hits in one of the sidebar stories: see the screenshot picture below, taken 20.5.12.

The 'story' is simply that this celeb (I'm assuming she's 'famous') has a large chest and wore a tight jumper.