Journalism is about creating a market. Define a place, an industry, a lifestyle, and serve those buyers with compelling information relevant to their interests. Then seek out the folks who sell to these groups. Make connections, generate sales. Wash, rinse, repeat.

What’s this crap about “quality.” It’s in the eye of the beholder. What matters is whether it’s compelling, whether it serves the market, whether they come back and share things with you (like their information).

Everyone in this business goes about it back-asswards. It’s the business model that counts. Define that and you define your audience. Serve your audience, get a big share of that audience dedicated to you, and then getting big bucks for “ads” becomes easy, because you’re no longer selling “ads,” but the chance to sell your stuff to the people you want to sell it to.

Those quality characteristics are things I see in comments, people do care about reputation because new media is all about reputation metrics, people care about correctness because I see people calling other people out. In terms of objectivity I see lots of comments that value it and in terms of craftsmanship, there is a lot of creative effort that goes into new media also.

When it comes to habits however, the push for readership is a push for lowest hanging fruit, so if this is a media race for lowest common denominator then the long-term sea of change is self-perpetuating, because that very same audience that sways to a short-term trend, will question the value of their own media consumption.

When those questions begin to permeate the life of the media user, then the question will become about what the purpose of news really is – and that could lead to a further shrinking of the market. There is money to be made in the mass middle, this is a no brainer – but in terms of quality, what is changing right now is expediency rather than quality and to me that is a short-term win with long-term consequences that have not yet so far registered, or at least may serve as the next sea of change.

[Em]

While Wikipedia is a fascinating example of gathering the collected knowledge of the group, I fear a world where its truthiness will stand in for well-researched information from people and companies who have developed reputations based on their desire to be as objective as possible. Colbert’s experiment where he has updated Wiki pages to his liking is art-imitating-life. We’ve all read things on Wikipedia that we either know not to be true. How many of us take the time to research and correct them?

Crowdsourcing cannot replace investagative reporting. Most bloggers are commentators, not reporters. Who do you suggest will find and report the news? Will non-paid bloggers be embedded with troops during war? If society places no value on professional journalism, we’re all worse off for it.

And wasn’t the “consumers’ nose” always been the controlling factor? Haven’t they always been the ones deciding which paper to buy or network to watch?

The purpose of journalism in the peculiar American culture and its individuality is to inform the populace such that they can make intelligent decisions about those choices that impact on their lives.

In his Correctness he fails to mention that getting information for many sources is not the same as original sources. Passing on wrong information because you can update it with new information does not address the credibility of the new information.

In Objectivity, Yes it is important to have different interpretations of the same facts. Sometimes the facts change because of as additional information. Then it is necessary to get different interpretations on the new information.

In Craftsmanship, there is a lot of bovine excrement here. This is the most dangerous part of his Quad. “Winning audiences rather than having good content. If one is only interested in “Propaganda” then this is fine. Some audiences already have their biases and giving them what they want runs counter to providing the public with good and accurate information to help them make intelligent decisions about their lives.

Rupert Murdoc has turned American journalism away from the ideals that began with John Peter Zenger through some of the best in Edward R. Murrow along with Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution. There are qualities of the past that are still important today – even though the speed of information is quite different. Mr Elowitz is correct in his analysis of the speed of information.

Mr Elowitz has it wrong. He needs to walk the beat.