Of course, media will go through the debate of how to maintain standards under attack by shoddy reporting, but that has always been the case. It’s just that we monitored ourselves, with mixed success. (Jayson Blair?)Citizen journalism is not going away, so newspapers need to embrace it, as you suggest they have.

As to your question of the history of the last three years of journalism, I’d add the rise of public dialogue. Sure, newspapers used to employ letters to the editor. Then they added comment spaces at the end of articles placed online. Now, smart media are becoming centers of information AND dialogue. They integrate community discourse. Of course, they have to figure out how to make a profit at it as well. Which brings us back to community journalists…..

David Hertz

That said, I do have a question about how this schema might be used to help us think through the ways in which news organization are themselves internally divided. I get that you are talking about “predominant” trends, but what are we to make, say, of the increased importance within ‘traditional’ news orgs of programmers (or programmer-journalists, or whatever one might call them)? One relevant part of the recent history, it seems to me, is that many ‘traditional’ orgs have reintegrated online and print staffs and some individuals within the organization retain a higher standing in this process. And this higher standing translates, presumably, into a different vision of what constitutes ‘fact-gathering’ itself (I am thinking of Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock, for instance; or Matt Waite’s Politifact, etc.).

My question for you, then, is this: is there a way you can envision your schema as incorporating the ways in which news orgs are internally divided? Or is this question orthogonal to your present concern?

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

-Matt

I guess that’s my issue––is that I don’t see the schema as having a whole lot of value outside of a strictly academic setting. How does the schema change how I operate or think about the world? By itself, It doesn’t.

That said, if you were to take it and tweak it so that you used it to numerically score news orgs on some Anderson scale of dinosaur/mammalness and then charted out those scores with regards to profitability, growth, revenues vs costs and other metrics of survivability in the digital age, then you’d have something interesting.

Play along for a minute. What do *you* think the value of the schema is? And how do you think it could be applied, if at all … or do you think that in practical terms it is fairly useless?