"[The article] is not dead. I did not kill it." The words of new media prophesier Jeff Jarvis in a Media Guardian article investigating the future, ironically enough, of the printed article. This defensive stance has become a trademark of Jarvis' musings about mainstream media.
Following a now familiar tack, journalism lecturer Jarvis pokes a digital stick at traditional media outlets. He suggests that their structures are inherently outmoded and on the brink of collapse and foretells of a brave new world diametrically opposed to the linear one which they have inhabited for far too long. When he gets the occasional brickbat in response, his usual schtick is to feign shock (hurt, even), before conceding how unsettling it must be for those being forced out of their old media comfort blankets - but reasserting that it is a fate which inevitably befall them whether they embrace it or not. Is that salt I sense being gleefully rubbed into an open wound? Probably.
In his analysis of the article as the base unit of print journalism, Jarvis questions whether this is sustainable or even desirable in the near future. In adopting a "digital first" way of thinking, he argues, articles should be viewed as luxuries or mere by-products of a new media process. The partially constructed immediacy of the internet should take precedence. The article - and, by extension, its broadcast equivalent, the package - would no longer be the gold standard.
For a man so keen to promote the bottom-up wonders of the web, Jarvis is curiously quick to dictate how journalism should look in the future. In his view of a world with fewer articles, he returns to a theme which runs through much of his new-media analysis - abundance. More is, well, more, apparently.
"Digital is freeing...infinite," opines Jarvis. For those with infinite time to explore these infinite possibilities, that may be true. For the rest of the real world, the wholesale dismantling of traditional journalistic structures would leave chaos in its wake. The benefits that might flow from a greater stream of information would surely be wiped out by the difficulty in navigating a meaningful path through the unmoderated verbiage.
Then comes the vague notion of the role journalists themselves will play in this new world order. And here, Jarvis wheels out his disturbingly amorphous vision of news organisations as "less of a producer, more an open platform for the public to share what it knows." In other words, professional journalists - with the contacts, access and training that affords them - are to be relegated almost to bystander status and are supposed to revel in the sight of others doing the job for them. Of course, some might do it better - but many will not.
Whatever Jarvis might want to see jettisoned and whatever I would like see to preserved do not really count for much in the end. "Digital first" might already be coming down the track, though there is no guarantee that it will reach its final destination.
It's "digital only" which is a more worrying prospect.
