My three recent favorites.
Jay Rosen (who is strangely everywhere in my reading these days), describes the struggles of old media types are archetypally the struggle of migrants:
I see the tribe of professional journalists as people who have come to the end of one way of life. They can’t live on the land they settled so succesfully for so long. And they’re at the point now where they realize they have to migrate across this divide to a new platform.
And migration is hard for any group of people. Because they have to pull up their homes, they have to rebuild in a new world, and like migrants everywhere they have to decide what it is they can take and what’s going to be essential on the other side. And a lot of them don’t want to go, and a lot of them are saying “I’m staying here,” and they’re kind of in this trauma of having to resettle on land that is new and different to them. And, to make matters even more disconcerting, there’s people already there who are building the new world of media.
Tom Brokaw, in the New Yorker’s fascinating profile of MSNBC and Keith Olbermann, calls the change now occurring “the second big bang”:
Brokaw calls this moment in the news media “the second big bang.” “We are creating a new universe, and it has all kinds of new laws and science and physics coming into play as well, in this information world,” he told me. “And you’ve got planets out there colliding with each other, new life forms taking shape; others have drifted too close to the sun, and they’ve burned up. And we don’t know how it’s all going to settle down. And it has, now and forevermore, a radiant effect.”
And Josh (the boss himself), speaking at Berkman’s big 10 year anniversary, describes the mentality of established journalists as similar to that of people living in a city infected with the plague:
The journalism profession today is almost like a plagued city, where everyone assumes they will be dying at some point in the relatively near future, but they don’t know quite when. So you have a mix of fatalism and denial.
