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in the current digital news ecosystem, having “week” in your title is anachronistic in the extreme, what an investor would call negative equity.

in a publishing landscape filled with the lame and infirm, weeklies are the most profoundly challenged. A weekly schedule, with its tight turnarounds and frenzied production, is costly as a matter of course. Monthlies can still do step-backs for readers who don’t expect to see what happened five minutes ago, and daily newspapers have co-opted the newsweekly formula to build in real-time analysis.

It is axiomatic that in the current epoch, it is much less cost-intensive to build out a new brand than to try to walk back the cat on a legacy business.

The Center for Future Civic Media is working to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

We use the term civic media, rather than citizen journalism: civic media is any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting. MIT students are experimenting with a variety of new civic media techniques, from technologies for protests and civil disobedience to phone-texting systems that allow instant, sophisticated votes on everyday activities. The Center amplifies the development of these technologies for community empowerment, while also serving to generate curricula and open-source frameworks for civic action.

“participatory culture”

"Yet we are the last stalwarts; my photojournalist friends at other mainstream newspapers say their travel budgets are gone. The LA Times, US News and Newsweek appear to be sliding towards bankruptcy; The Washington Post closed nearly all its foreign bureaux; Time is a shadow of its former self.

what is dead is not photojournalism - what is dead is the particular culture of photojournalism that supported us for the past 30 years.

new models for raising cash to do projects - the grants, agency workshops, Emphasis, the partnerships with NGOs (which I find troubling for reasons I won't detail here), and others. I myself am using Emphasis to raise money for a book project.

our 'photo-op' culture, where much of everyday life seems picture driven and played out in front of the camera.

"As a professional practice, photojournalism has historically relied on two forms of scarcity. The first involved the scarcity of skills to make good images, and the second the scarcity of popular access to the dominant forms of print distribution, the newspapers and magazines. Both of these limits have now been fundamentally challenged.

"Amateurs are able to purchase and use the best camera technology to make striking photographs, and - although it is not solely responsible for the decline of newspapers - the transformative power of the Internet has reduced the cost of publication to near zero, thereby opening up new channels for the circulation of imagery. Together these transformations have produced a new era of abundant pictures.