Peoria Pundit

Jeff Jarvis, media blogger and one of my personal gurus, recently offered up his responses to the complaints mainstream media types offer up about the Internet and the Blogosphere:

People are rude on the internet. True. They’re rude in life, but perhaps more so online, thanks to anonymity. But we all know who the idiots are. The smart response is to ignore the stupid.

In wanted to bring this into the conversation over civility on blogs happening here and here.

Back in the days when AOL Chat rooms meant something, there was a feature that allowed users to ignore those who insisted on behaving like trolls. A click of the button, and that person’s words went away forever. Smart people tended to ignore the same people because trolls are easilly recognized. If you ignored someone who was simply saying things with which you disagreed, you risked being left out of the conversation.

Blogs need something like that. This way, the power to ignore is left in the hands of the end user, not the blog owners. Call it grassroots blog moderation.

Anyway, the entire article is of interest to those with an interest in citizen journalism and public forums.

Here in Peoria, we often discuss the cost of various of various projects in terms of how many feet of sidewalks it would buy, or how many police or firefighter salaries is would cover.

Blogger Jeff Jarvis looked at the (minumum) $700 million billion financial company buyout and made an informal list of some of the things the United States could have bought instead with that money. His list:

• Give 3.5 billion One Laptop Per Child machines for every Muslim child and every child in China
• Free broadband access for every American for 20 years, or take $5 to $14 billion and build a nationwide WiMAX network.
• Free private college educations for 4.4 million people, or free public school educations for 26 milllion people.
• Triple America’s research and development spending.

All these these would make America vastly more competitive, or would improve the world’s understanding of us, and improve the business environment. Instead, we are going to be uncompetitive by rewarding companies that make bad business decisions.

We’ve spent decades behaving like crackheads. And the government’s solution is more crack.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has issued orders that no news articles be placed on the newspaper’s Website until AFTER the story appears in print. This includes “signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts.” Some breaking news might make it to their site, but that’s it. Sounds sort of like the way PJStar.com used to be. Now, many routine stories, features, columns and editorials appear hours before deadline and the day’s edition is sent to the printer.

Blogger/online news advocate Jeff Jarvis offered this advice to Inquirer staffers:

Get the hell out now! Get away from these fools or you’ll get it on you. Let’s hold a new Norg meeting right now and organize a competitor to the ailing Inquirer. It won’t take much to kill it now. Let’s put it out of its misery.

To which I responded:

Jeff, you are missing the big picture. This is actually GOOD news for the future of online journalism. Print journalism is dead. The body just hasn’t stopped moving. By tossing all their news onto the Web for free, newspapers are freezing out online start-ups that would probably need to charge a small subscription fee to survive. Much smaller, in fact, than the cost of home delivery.

In other words, by offering for free what their would-be competitors would have to offer for a fee, newspapers’ free Web sites are an anti-competitive act.

By insisting that their news must appear on paper first, the Inquirer is actually opening the door for an online start up. I’m sure that there are forward-thinking entrepreneurs who are thinking that Philly is now a target rich environment.

The best thing that could happen for the news gathering industry would be for a newspaper like the Inquirer to vanish off the face of the earth and be replaced with an online-only norg (love that term, BTW). It would scare the rest into evolving, at last.

Jarvis makes a ton of good points in this post and in the one referenced in the quote.

Seriously, people. Delivering news by newspaper during the digital age is sorta like traveling cross country by covered wagon right after construction of the Interstate Highway System.