Nieman Foundation at Harvard
In an interview about his new book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov talks about the potential for devaluing citizenship, the danger of ceding regulatory responsibility to Google, and, of course, the future of newspapers:
It depends on what the newspapers hold for the future. A lot of newspapers have embraced the digital rhetoric too eagerly, and have not articulated their own value to the public. A lot of what we hear from internet pundits is that everyone should be building their own reading lists, everyone should be on the lookout for interesting stories themselves, I think that logic is very regressive, backward, anti-democratic and stupid.
I’m fine with a staff of 300 people reading 5,000 stories everyday and condensing them into 25 pages that I myself can read. That’s a wonderful model. The newspaper offers something very different from Google’s aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.
