Monday, April 18, 2016

Journalism's mad world




*Obligatory starting song*

It was a pretty hectic day yesterday manning the Freeman fort, thanks to the one Donald named Trump, not to mention The Chelsea Of The Clintons, plus your random police blotter acts of mayhem insanity, and only today I've been able to get some of the 360-degree stuff up.

I'm playing with those formats and presentation, still, trying to figure out the best way to deliver virtual reality and 360-degree content, considering that most of us don't yet have virtual reality devices, or good ones, anyway, secretly wondering if I'm trying to solve a problem nobody asked for.

But the wheels of disruption care not for professional existential anxieties, and just today, YouTube announced that it will support 360-degree video live-streaming, and that opens the possibilities tenfold, including hyperbolic "Matrix" references, even though nobody has figured out how to make this work in a sustainable business model, which is fine for us journalists, I guess, until we're all unemployed and wondering why everything crumbled around our overlong run-on sentences.

And we do all this while ducking charges of "This isn't journalism" and "how come you aren't covering x or y or this news or that?" while at the same time, another study of the obvious points out that "People hate hard news, but love pretending otherwise."

And so we must resurface another truth, that the light content partially subsidizes the harder things, by relieving it from market pressures to perform or fill random goals, and just let the journalism stand on its own.

And so it was Pulitzer Day today and the journalism was fierce, as was Congrats Media Twitter. So congrats to you if you don't know what Congrats Media Twitter is.

There's, of course, a proper essay hidden in all these thoughts, with accompanying gifs and assorted multimedia, neatly packaged in a monetized Facebook Instant article.
But not today.
Today we fight the Content Management System —I do have a day job — until the beast dies of stubborn obsolescence or it brings us down into the pits of darkness like a fire demon with nothing to lose.



It's a mad journalism world out there.
And I'm glad I get to try to shape it, if only a tiny bit.

P.S. I'm breaking form from the regular newsletter convention you all love (that's what I tell myself, anyway), but there's definitely a cat in one of those links. I guess you're going to have to click.

Yesterday's Internet, Today! also plays with forms of distribution and hopes you don't mind.