Ta-Nehisi Coates: On Making Yourself Right (The Atlantic)
‘Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.’
Clay Shirky: Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic
“The thing I really want to impress on my students is that the commercial case for news only matters if the profits are used to subsidize reporting the public can see, and that civic virtue may be heart-warming, but it won’t keep the lights on, if the lights cost more than cash on hand. Both sides of the equation have to be solved.”
Newsless.org: "The case for context: my opening statement for SXSW"
The always-great Matt Thompson on why episodic news content isn't as helpful as laying a contextual groundwork for a story and then letting readers know about events that happen in that framework.
"Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects."