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Jenna McWilliams, education researcher and curriculum specialist at Project New Media Literacies, recently picked up a new side-gig: columnist for The Guardian online.
Her first two posts are up now–the first on the film State of Play and its ignorance of how journalism works in the digital era–and the other, published yesterday, questions Rupert Murdoch’s recent proclamation that news online will inevitably revert to a pay-per-view model. A taste:
The technology guru Clay Shirky writes that “It’s not a revolution if nobody loses,” and the first losers in this particular revolution were broadcast media outlets (TV, newspapers, magazines) and cultural elites whose social status relied on the ability to control who had access to the news, what stories they had access to, and what they did with that information.
If Murdoch is right that “the current days of the internet will soon be over,” it will only be because a small handful of corporations own the vast majority of media outlets. My sense, though, is that he’s wrong: That even if newspapers return to a pay-for-view model, the people will rise up against and then roll right over it by making the same content available for free elsewhere online and developing new uses for social media that subvert the efforts of Murdoch and others.
So keep an eye on Jenna’s Guardian pieces. And be sure to comment quickly–the Guardian is running its own experiment by allowing comments only for the first two days after publication.
