Blog tasks (Lecture)
1) Clay Shirky argues that "accountability journalism" is so important because it is a public good and brings subjects and corruption that are normally hidden to light. The example he gives of this is the trial of Father John Geoghan, who was a priest and pedophile who had been employed by the Catholic Church since the 1960s. Three Globe reporters had been working on this story and they had gotten hold of the documents the church had been forced to submit in the upcoming trial.
2) Shirky believes that there is a relationship between newspapers and advertisers. If advertisers are forced to overpay for the services they receive, newspapers essentially will have the kind of speculative investment capital to do long-range, high-risk work such as the one on the catholic church. Websites such as Monster and Match and Craigslist have replaced major revenue-generators for newspapers.
3) Shirky suggests that audiences are consuming their news from other sites rather than the original newspaper sites. Shirky states that the number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year because users don't go to the Times, they go to the story from an alternative website such as a Twitter or Facebook and this benefits them rather than the news site.
4) Shirky suggests that the child abuse scandal with the Catholic Church may have been different if the internet had been widespread in 1992 as users would be able to quickly forward it and read it online, and this could easily reach hundreds of readers. However during the period of the scandal one would have had to clip out an article in the paper and mail it, which would take days or even weeks to arrive.
5) Shirky argues against paywalls because he believes that paywall damages general news and benefits financial news. He also states that a paywall is a violation of contract to make use of the news as an audience.
6) A social good is something thatt benefits the largest number of people in the largest possible way in a positive manner. Journalism can be described as a 'social good' as news stories and investigative journalism for example can bring corruption to light and also inform the audience of what is going on in the world. This will then lead to justice.
9)Shirky believes that newspapers are irreplaceable in their production of accountability journalism and that instead we should expend any effort or resources we can to keep ourselves from having to replace them. However, there is currently a revolution taking place in media production, the current shock in the media environment is so inimical to the 20th-century model of news production that time spent trying to replace newspapers is misspent effort and that we should instead be transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of smaller, overlapping models of accountability journalism.
10) I believe that it is very important for major media brands such as the New York Times or the Guardian to continue staying in business and providing news as they have the power and skills to take time investigating serious crimes, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing in a professional manner. This is important for society as the readers need to be aware of what is going on in the world, and investigative journalism can even bring justice in some cases.
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