Rosen and Shirky discuss “Journalism Primary Sources” on YouTube

Posted on | December 22, 2009 | 2 Comments

Jay Rosen recently sat down for a Q&A with Clay Shirky and then posted it to YouTube in five parts. Shirky is the author of the excellent Here Comes Everbody, which I’ve recommended nearby. (Full disclosure: I’m a tad conflicted. If you buy it through my affiliate thing at the bottom right, I’ll get a cut. Just saying.)

In the first part, embedded below, Rosen starts the Q & A with his single prepared question:

On March 15, you sent me an e-mail at about 11 o’clock at night with a link to a post you had written called ‘Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,’ and the last time I looked this post had 1,100 links to it, which is, for [as] anyone who is a blogger knows, a very difficult feat to get that many in-bound links to one single post. When you sent me that e-mail at 11 o’clock at night, you said, “I’m becoming obsessed.” What obsession was this and why were you obsessed?

The Q&A goes on from there.

Part 2 (17:17), where they discuss Jeff Jarvis (briefly), an amazing thing called the “business model,” micropayments, the persistence of pressures on newspapers other than economic ones, Habermas, the origins of the press and the public, Tocqueville, infovores, the threat of surveillance, and the missing front page in online news.

Part 3 (8:03), where they discuss NewAssignment.Net & Huffington Post‘s Off The Bus and Barack Obama’s campaign.

Part 4 (13:34), where Rosen asks for Shirky’s opinion on why American public confidence in the American press dropped over the last 30 years despite the rise in journalistic professionalism, Rathergate, factchecking vs. after-the-factchecking, Trent Lott, and the forwarding of articles about priestly abuse.

Part 5 (4:35), where each explains why he studies media. Rosen shares his experience as a kid “marooned on the end of the television set, connected up to the media but totally isolated from anyone else.”  Shirky describes his first experience with the Internet and then moves from that to his more recent reasons for studying media.

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