It occurs to me, human industry being what it is, that any endeavor, such as journalism, will be subject to ever increasing complexity and well, let’s say modulation; if for no other reason than for increasing the value of the product as well as the practitioners’ self-worth. While the printing press may have been technically more complex than a scribe, the scribe was able to illuminate or enhance the text whereas printed versions were virtual facsimiles and in that way simpler and more transparent. With the added layer of commercial economic models, content is skewed to serve the revenue source, advertising. 20th century media, broadcast or print, was structured to facilitate advertising, dictating the amount of time/space alloted to stories as well as the tone, timbre, and editorial slant. This effect on transparency is particularly pernicious because the motivation is entirely tangential to the content i.e. a story modulated in a way that will best help the sale of corn flakes.

New journalism will acquire sponsors, be it the church, GM, or just a multitude of online “friends”. Citizen or professional journalists are pipers and someone will be paying for the tune.

So once again we are in an era where a new technology is disrupting the private interests that have attached themselves to an industry over time. Actually the technology is affecting nearly all industries across the board similarly and the old value systems, alliances, and methodologies that are dead weights are being sheared off because they are inefficient and ineffective.

But it’s a two edged sword because these accretions that form around institutions are also what define the character of a culture, in fact it could be said that they are culture itself. So while we marvel at our new found transparency, it is inevitable that we will “spice to taste”, we will form cohorts and complex psychological relationships around the structures, narratives and myths will build new complexes around the reformed institutions.

Journalism, being a method in which we self inform as a society, presents a peculiar double standard in that there is an inherent conflict between our need to perceive reality and the process of interpreting it into a cultural narrative. Purity, or clarity of perception, is not necessarily the same as truth as defined by cultural resonance. Journalism is not a science, nor is it a fanciful entertainment. Journalism/media is by definition somewhere in the middle.