Rob: And it's
hypocrisy too, because it really comes out in such a fake way, where they'll
take one side and the other and say they're equal in value and truth when so often
they're not. / And one side--
Peggy: / That's correct.
Rob: --What they're giving equal voice to is just a side
that is paying for the advertising.
Peggy: And it skews the story. So, this
notion of a possibility-orientationed storytelling, I think it could be
profound. And then the very last thing I'll say about the journalism work is
the Holy Grail of most the people I know who are looking at, "So, what will the
new w orld look like?"--is what's the
business model. How, what are the
sources of revenue for doing journalism," And frankly it will be the last thing
we find, and I say that because the moment somebody figures that one out, we'll
stop looking.
The amazing experimentation, and there are
wonderful experiments going on: An example comes to mind is Spot.us, which is a form
of crowd funding investigative journalism. One of my favorite experiments that
grew out of these gatherings that we do that bring the diversity of the people
who are thinking about these questions together, and becomes a generator of
innovative ideas.
Rob: I'll throw some thoughts at you. I, in my writing on
my political website, have started a war against Big. I've been inspired partly
by Bernie Sanders and his attempts to legislate against Too Big to Fail
corporations. I've written a series of articles about the
"de-billionaire-izing" the United States and the world--to make it illegal to
have so much money. And I think that if you think about journalism as too
big--let's face it, one of the reasons I think it's in trouble is because it
lost its diversity. Now what you're talking about in bringing it back to the
community is almost the reversal of what's been happening, where big chains
have been acquiring local newspapers, and then dumping the same garbage into
every newspaper with a very small budget for local coverage.
In my theory of a Bottom-up World, humans had
a bottom-up world before civilization. Indigenous cultures are bottom up,
tribal culture is bottom up. Civilization brought us the ability to produce
large amounts of food through mass farming. It gave us the ability to
specialize in jobs, but it's taken away from us too, and I think journalism,
when you're looking at a new model, the model is already there. It's the blog.
It's the small focused site and Twitter !
Twitter, for an awful lot of people now, is the place people go for the
latest news. And it's not like there is this one newspaper that does it, it's
all these people who are looking and seeing and sharing the information from
all the different places, and it's distributed non-centralized approach, that
is also a key part of a bottom up revolution--is going from centralized, which
is what the big newspaper does, to decentralized, which is what Twitter does.
Peggy: Well, there's an interesting mix in
it, because I think it is about both big and small. And there's a term I
sometimes use: "Differentiated Wholeness," because the benefit of big is that
we have a coherent narrative that ties us together in some way, and yet, how we
get to big is radically different in Twitter, which in a sense, I mean that's
big. But we're getting there in an abrogated kind of way. The coherence arises
from, as opposed to, in the old model of that you were describing, of the same
content that somebody is dictating from on high--is getting dumped in lots of
different places. So, / I think there is
a big and a small.
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