Jay Rosen's New Media '10 Cmdts' ain't necessarily true

Starting wit his claim media atomization has been overcome. It hasn't, because of the price level of new media. To the degree it consolidates, then it will professionalize, with some of the issues of "old media."

For instance, more than three years ago, in Dallas, a group of people started a site called Pegasus News. It serves as an aggregator of bloggers (and maybe Twitterers, soon enough) on local arts, entertainment, politics, etc, while mixing in rewrites and expansions of press releases and the occasional actual story.

So, my default, if you're one the cool/lucky bloggers to have been picked up, especially early in Pegasus' history, and especially if it was without being noticed by the Dallas Morning News, you've got an inside edge.

So, in that sense, atomization may be lessened. But, Pegasis doesn't run all of the blog posts it gets from bloggers it "favorites." So, it's now ... wait for it ... a filter.

Some of the commandments are "fat chance," like this from Rosen's second commandment:

Closed systems [i.e. old media] bring editorial oversight and the authority of a respected brand while open ones crowdsource information and are easy to use. What both systems should have is trust and ethics.

But, if Rosen would have read Tech Crunch's pieceon an infamous Fort Hood-posted Army blogger, which I blogged about here, he'd be more circumspect about the likelihood of that happening soon.

Another of his commandments he just throws out without saying what will happen to it:

"Half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half."
Unlike the first six recent quotes, this one is almost a century old. Rosen attributes it to Philadelphia businessman John Wanamaker/

But, Rosen doesn't wonder what will happen ot the good half vs. wasted half of advertising if he's wrong, and the new media does remain atomized to some degree.

Others of the commandments aren't "wrong," they just fall into "what does this mean?" If people need better filters, since "old media" now isn't a "filtering force," or whatever, will they just give up instead? Give up filtering, or eventually tune out?

Rosen, along with Jeff Jarvis and some others (I don't think Clay Shirky is that bad) need to take to heart a previous post of mine, that "Internet triumphalism is not a public good.

It's kind of frustrating for people like this to be triumphal to the point of making overstated new media guru claims. Be more modest, realistic and fact-based about what's actually happening, or you start repeating the mistakes, and the hubris, of the old media on which you shovel dirt.

'Old media' vs. 'new media' and media vs. messages

"Old media" vs. "new media"? The difference is ultimately in the medium more than the message quality. Yes, blogs have broken news stories before the "MSM" and Twitter has added color to stories, but Twitter has releasd just as much inaccurate info as the MSM outlets at breaking news events, adn blogs can look like news but be as slanted as bad MSM coverage.

Give me paywalls - from the top down

It's nice that some seven-day dailies, which have a fair amount of local news content, are going to paywalls, but really, that's not enough to solve the national issue.

The real problem, though, is lack of leadership by the AP, not individual newspapers. AP ought to put mandatory paywalls, with anti-Reuters/AFP exclusivity, into another revision of new AP contract. Then, it ought to abut quintuple its rates for Google et al, (with similar exclusivity clauses), high enough that Google would have to paywall, too, and couldn't do this on ads alone.

Who died and made Jay Rosen God of what's wrong with papers?

Some of his ideas about the future of media are good, but others, like saying papers ought to forget about putting up paywalls, are lunacy.

So, we should ignore the fact that ads will likely NEVER monetize online papers, and rely on the kindness of tip jars, pledge drives and whatever else?

If people like him actually worked at papers, it would be one thing, but he's an academic. As for Jeff Jarvis, another bloviator, I swear he's on Google's payroll.