In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
Theron DesRosier on 09 Mar 09"In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive. This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.org/futureofeverything/), brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus. Date: May 19, 2009 Place: Norwood, MA"
