ToC to the "Newspaper" buzz @ Text Technologies

I found a great annotated table of contents to the recent buzz about Newspapers at Text Technologies. posted by Curt Manash. Nice work!

Without comment, here it is:

• Clay Shirky asserted that it is time to think the unthinkable about the collapse of the newspaper industry.
• Zachary Seward argued that most of the questions and challenges had been figured out already in the mid-1990s, but answers have been sadly lacking since. I participated in discussions of that kind then too, and I agree with him. ( Indeed, a number of those were in my own living room, with two-term Author’s Guild board member Linda Barlow.)
• Micah Sifry proposed three areas of technical advance that he thinks would help advance “pro/am” collaborative news — better collaboration tools (sure), better web text mining (I suspect he’s conflating several distinct things in that one), and better data visualization (I’m so non-visual that I have little opinion on that one).
• Alex Payne suggested that technology journalism isn’t very good, and proposed some fixes. Frankly, I think his focus is in the wrong place, but maybe I’m misreading him.
• Nature Magazine discoursed on the changes in how scientific information gets to the public. Nature also offered suggestions for changing science journalism that aren’t much different than what Payne proposes in technology.
• Eric Clemons wrote a post for TechCrunch arguing that internet advertising in its present form(s) is doomed to failure. Fierce controversy ensued. For example, Danny Sullivan was infuriated by Clemons’ assertion that pay-per-click search advertising is in some way inherently dishonest.
• Expanding on Clemons’ theme, Doc Searls mixed I-told-you-so with a proposal for micropayments.
• TechCrunch honcho Michael Arrington wrote about the tangles of real and perceived bias.
• Henry Blodget offered a pithy take on the numbers.
• Dan Conover offered a huge number of ideas about the future of the news business.
• A couple of months ago, Jason Calcanis highlighted some dangers of the low-privacy Internet era. I think that’s relevant to this discussion, because if the future of news and commentary is that lots of people provide it, and their biases are balanced or held in check by a general Internet community, incivility can be a serious obstacle.
• And finally, here is a collection of political cartoons about the real or supposed death of newspapers, some quite poignant or funny.