It will be interesting to see what this news site looks like when in debuts later this year. I would bet $5 that it’s all hype and proclamations of doing something different, while being basically another news source. Their dislike of “beats” seems rather like Whole Foods dislike of the word “employees,” referring to them rather as “team members.” I’m a little skeptical of this “new phenomenology of news.” Anyone care to disagree?
Jacob I agree with your whole foods analogy to their proposed reorganization of news. It is a great idea in theory, however it seems a little presumptuous for them to claim that their journalists are capable of tackling overarching “phenomenon” such as climate change and the financial crisis- unlike current existing news sources.
Ah this was such an interesting article… there’s a John Muir quote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” I think this encompasses well the difficulty of trying to explain any “phenomenon” without touching upon a range of ideas connected to it.
Also, this process of questioning traditional “beat”-oriented organization of news, enabled by the internet and related technologies, opens the door for reorganizing news in ways that can be better tailored to fit with people’s cognitive processes. One of my I School classmates and I were just discussing this as an idea for our second year project– would love to talk to you more about this once we have a more solid idea of what we’re trying to work towards.
Though I think the writer of the post is massively full of hot air, I also think Isha has really good points. There is definitely something to thinking in terms of relationships, particularly as we now live in a networked world, and also have a deeper understanding of the many contexts and contingencies behind most behavior. The Drucker essay in our readings says some very interesting things about this. That said, this company seems to think its (likely young, likely low-paid) staff of reporters can move among highly complex ecologies at a moment’s notice without becoming facile and/or burned out. I doubt it. More likely, the problem should be addressed with software, which seeks relationships and expertise among different sources, and using innovative graphics steers story selection and expertise that is then human-mediated to make a product that is both illuminating and pleasurable to consume.
That’s not what these hand-wavers are offering, however.
It will be interesting to see what this news site looks like when in debuts later this year. I would bet $5 that it’s all hype and proclamations of doing something different, while being basically another news source. Their dislike of “beats” seems rather like Whole Foods dislike of the word “employees,” referring to them rather as “team members.” I’m a little skeptical of this “new phenomenology of news.” Anyone care to disagree?
Jacob I agree with your whole foods analogy to their proposed reorganization of news. It is a great idea in theory, however it seems a little presumptuous for them to claim that their journalists are capable of tackling overarching “phenomenon” such as climate change and the financial crisis- unlike current existing news sources.
Ah this was such an interesting article… there’s a John Muir quote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” I think this encompasses well the difficulty of trying to explain any “phenomenon” without touching upon a range of ideas connected to it.
Also, this process of questioning traditional “beat”-oriented organization of news, enabled by the internet and related technologies, opens the door for reorganizing news in ways that can be better tailored to fit with people’s cognitive processes. One of my I School classmates and I were just discussing this as an idea for our second year project– would love to talk to you more about this once we have a more solid idea of what we’re trying to work towards.
Though I think the writer of the post is massively full of hot air, I also think Isha has really good points. There is definitely something to thinking in terms of relationships, particularly as we now live in a networked world, and also have a deeper understanding of the many contexts and contingencies behind most behavior. The Drucker essay in our readings says some very interesting things about this. That said, this company seems to think its (likely young, likely low-paid) staff of reporters can move among highly complex ecologies at a moment’s notice without becoming facile and/or burned out. I doubt it. More likely, the problem should be addressed with software, which seeks relationships and expertise among different sources, and using innovative graphics steers story selection and expertise that is then human-mediated to make a product that is both illuminating and pleasurable to consume.
That’s not what these hand-wavers are offering, however.