Jay Rosen says his new project, PressThink, is a “gift economy for news.” Yes, it’s an economy. But I fail to find that it’s a gift.
There’s only so much news one can read in a day. Like Rosen admitted himself, there’s a saturation point. People are going to like this project. I can see them champing at the bit to get behind the scenes in their child’s school, for example. And that’s great. But there’s a point where there’s just too much news about really refined entities — stuff that, quite honestly, you really don’t need to know. There IS such a thing, even in the news, as too much information. There also are way too many stalkers out there.
Wikipedia’s one thing. I use it, but just to get summaries, really. I can’t fathom that these news sources will be truly trustworthy, because in journalism, there’s always a pressure to publish, and some people (aka some people who have been poorly trained or haven’t been trained at all) just aren’t cut for the chase. Fabrication? Oh, you bet it’ll happen. No one’s really going to check up on these people on a regular basis to make sure they’re reporting truthfully. We’re under enough pressure in J-school to get articles done under deadline pressure of a few hours. Cut that significantly, which is what PressThink aims to do on late nights, and you’ll have a lot of leaks to the press that are unfounded.
