December 27, 2004

PressThink's Top Ten Ideas for 2004: Introduction

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, reBlogged by ts

These are my top ten ideas for the year 2004. The year in press think, as it were. I chose not the “best” ideas, but the ones most useful to me in figuring out what’s going on. They weren’t necessarily born in ‘04, either. But they emerged this year. Some have authors; usually it is many authors. Ready?

Here they are:

1. The Legacy Media. 2. He said, she said, we said. 3. What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press does to the media church. 4. Open Source Journalism, or: “My readers know more than I do.” 5. News turns from a lecture to a conversation. 6. “Content will be more important than its container.” 7. ‘What once was good—or good enough—no longer is.” 8. “The victory of affinity over geography.” 9. The Pajamahadeen. 10. The Reality-Based Community.

Now if I were Time magazine, this post would be called Idea of the Year, and I would unveil one as the “winner” right now. There is a certain temptation in that. But somehow I feel a top ten list is an established gimmick, “okay” if you do it well. Picking Person of the Year is an extreme gimmick. It falls into this dead zone between journalism, and hype. (See Time’s managing editor James Kelly try to manuever in the zone: “I think it’s very problematic to do God. Partly because I suppose you could do God every year.”)

This post is about ideas 1-3 on my list. In future posts I will unfold the others. Discussion of all ten can begin in comments now. (Particularly if you have ideal quotes and links for numbers 4-8. Help me out and post them, please.)

(Continued at PressThink)