Another reason I insist that it's gotterdamerung for the Israel lobby is that the old power paradigms are going out the window. The other day I was bitching about money to a friend who's in journalism school, and she said, Look, Phil, in Mumbai, the mainstream journalism was dominated by twitter feeds. The empire is teetering. I'm always the last to know, and I asked her to elaborate. Here goes. I am keeping her anonymous because these are impressions, and it was just an email:
We're in a moment of unprecedented disruption which means both crisis
and opportunity and I'm fixated on finding a way to exploit it. Five
years from now it might seem obvious what we could have done
differently. [beautiful point; just look back five years!]
that Friday so their reporters had to use phones, and the mainstream media
started using the twitter feeds to get their facts. Some of them were
wrong – that's one of the flaws, it gets into issues of credibility and
what is journalism and what will become of it. Big news media are no
longer able to afford AP, they're shutting down their foreign bureaus
and sharing resources. It's a teetering empire. New things will spring
up and Mumbai was an example of the possibilities, bloggers and citizen
stringers create the virtual infrastructure to cover news globally. My teacher pointed out a successful citizen newspaper in Korea - ohmynews.com - some of these alternatives could evolve and establish themselves as reliable sources. That's the opportunity.
The
difficulty is monetizing it and this problem usually conflicts with our
politics anyway but we can't avoid it. (Love those google ads :-) The new model of news relies
heavily on RSS feeds and outside content. For instance, you're an independent content
provider; and not all of our politics are so unpopular elsewhere in the world. Dubai is becoming a new media center - I heard they're building an NYU campus there.
So far the geeks have been one step ahead of the regulators but that's
one potential threat to all this messy beauty. I'd love to see this
kind of thing happen in Gaza, for instance – but without electricity it's hard for a huge buzz to emanate from somewhere, and the IDF even scrambled the Gaza boat's communication system for a while, but still…
