Comments on: Erhardt’s Response to The Elements of Journalism https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/22/erhardts-response-to-the-elements-of-journalism/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:45:42 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: Catherine https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/22/erhardts-response-to-the-elements-of-journalism/#comment-4369 Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:45:42 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=1916#comment-4369 You make a compelling case for upholding journalistic principles and standards while extending them to a broader public (notably youth) who are envisioned as legitimate authors and participants in civic discourse rather than simply “the marketed to” or “the audience” or “kids posting weird stuff to their friends”. Perhaps we can think about those principles and standards as the most important legacy of journalism and import some of those values into web creation now.

The other reason that I think focusing on the educational setting is important (and related back to my post this week on the Difference Quotient) is that in that setting we can structures encounters with difference in a way that is not possible elsewhere in everyday life. You have the power of the “assignment” to request that students explore an area or take a path that they might otherwise never choose and employ a new frame of reference (say, the frame and values of the journalist) while following that path. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this might work in practice.

]]> By: mstem https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/22/erhardts-response-to-the-elements-of-journalism/#comment-4363 Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:08:56 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=1916#comment-4363 I like the examples of specific tools and concrete practices that can help bridge the professional journalism ethics with web norms. I love to see these tools and practices encoded into actual publishing platforms, rather than rely on bloggers like David Weinberger to adopt the noble practice. (So, for example, Flickr prominently allows Creative Commons licensing and search by that criteria, where other sites like Facebook do not.)

]]> By: Erhardt https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/22/erhardts-response-to-the-elements-of-journalism/#comment-4351 Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:00:41 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=1916#comment-4351 Excellent point about the appeal to interlocking publics and the unbundling of newspapers. I was thinking the same thing in reading Catherine’s response, in which she laments the reduction of the “difference quotient” (http://partnews.brownbag.me/2013/02/21/journalism-and-the-difference-quotient/).

]]> By: Ethan https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/22/erhardts-response-to-the-elements-of-journalism/#comment-4340 Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:30:52 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=1916#comment-4340 Lots of interesting stuff in here, Erhardt. I’m interested to think about whether the interlocking publics idea survives the encounter with unbundling that Shirky talks about in this week’s readings – if we’re only encountering that which we’re expert and interested in, do we end up having the dissemination of issues and concerns we need. Your idea of pursuing authority metrics beyond PageRank is a rich one and one you should explore at some length… remind me to talk to you about Evgeny Morozov’s work on aggregation before he took on his current perma-critic stance.

]]> By: MC https://partnews.mit.edu/2013/02/22/erhardts-response-to-the-elements-of-journalism/#comment-4310 Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:06:34 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=1916#comment-4310 You might have seen this, but Aaron Swartz actually did have a proposal for a better system that he outlines in these blog entries- http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/usefultransparency and http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ist.

Also, I think your suggestion that we teach kids about journalism in school is great. That will not only help people “commit acts of journalism” and lower barriers to participation, but would give people the understanding necessary to improve the news in the future.

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