September 30, 2003
News You Can Use
“Too much news is useless,” says Jeff Jarvis, “I don't mean it's not important, useless in our daily lives.”
So, Jarvis proposes a new metric for valuing the quality of news: Useful vs. important, saying it is “a scale that will matter more as more people come online and reshape their definition of news.”
Jarvis is keying in on part of Jay Rosen’s interview with Merrill Brown, former editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com in which Rosen asks another good question: “Is journalism as a profession ready to open itself to ideas coming at it from the new horizon? Is it open to the people who are not journalists and who suddenly have more information power? Does journalism value its own intellectual capital?”
Go read them both: Jarvis and Rosen.