A Vanishing Journalistic Divide

The stallion of free-range journalism has broken free and is rounding up its herd. The Wild West of Ye Olde Interweb has not been reigned in by any metaphorical barbed-wire fence, yet. It just keeps moving forward.

New York Times reporter David Carr writes that, "more and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle."

The question is, is print dead or is print-ONLY dead?

Public Engagement with Science

The Age of Engagement blog by American University prof. Matthew Nisbet, is a really good example of a blog that mixes communication scholarship, ideas about public engagement, framing, and social commentary in an accessible and entertaining way. Some posts can be a bit long but all offer insight into the nexus of science and communication.

Again, this is at the aggregator site Big Think (also see previous post, from bt) which situates Nisbet's thinking within a milieu of other contemporary scholars and professional "thinkers."

What do you think? Will this so-called up-stream journalism provide a better context of facts beyond press-release regurgitation? Are news outlets that still provide longform journalism destined to die in a market of sound-bites and quicky information scanning?