Media

Pat Quirke is an auctioneer, and like many other small business owners he likes to take full advantage of his internet connection. Apart from his website and blog, he has a well-established presence on Twitter and Facebook. In fact, so successful have his online ventures been that he has recently managed to sell a property through Twitter.  All the viewings for the property were arranged through tweets. Things went so smoothly that when the deposit came to be paid the client had to ask directions to Pat Quirke’s office as he didn’t know where it was.

For Pat, there is no problem leveraging all the advantages of the Internet while working in a small town in rural Ireland. It’s when you leave the town itself and go into the true countryside that the promise of the Internet age fades quickly.

Five years ago, when my husband John and I moved to Clonmel, Ireland, Tipperary’s largest town, I was surprised to find that the only broadband access available for those of us living on the outskirts of the town was supplied by just one independent wireless broadband supplier.

Thanks to Mark Luckie at 10000words.net

It is a great infographic but it is also a great question, not only for journalists but for anyone who would not normally consider learning how to program as something suitable or worthwhile for them to put time and effort into.

With increasingly sophisticated interfaces which hide the guts of an operating system away from the user becoming the norm and interactions reduced to pressing and swiping a screen there is barely a need to know anything about how a given computer or smartphone really works.

So what arguments exist for taking on the additional and sometimes arduous chore of learning to program a computer?

We’ll let you answer that in the comments section.

An alternative approach would be to look at why you shouldn’t learn to program.

Well, first of all programming is hard: It can be but learning to programme can be done in small bite-size chunks. There are some fantastic manuals out there and a lot of thought has gone into how best to allow newbies get their feet wet without drowning them at the get-go.

Most of the discussion around the decline of mainstream media (MSM) news has been in the context of the upsurge in competition from the Internet and the subsequent loss of advertising revenue. Coping with the reduced income has resulted in the closure of many outlets and drastic cutbacks at those enterprises that have somehow kept going. On top of this, getting rid of seasoned professionals has resulted not in an overlap between the old and new, but in a knowledge gap in the handover process that appears more like an abyss of ignorance. Young journalists are having to reinvent the wheel in the absence of generative guidance.

Times change and the transition from the old to the new has to have a cost, but it did not have to be like this. While it is easy to blame the more difficult changes and the subsequent hardships as something wrought by the advent of social media and that was therefore somehow inevitable, there is some culpability that lies with the old guard too.

During a talk to staff at a very large MSM outlet last year, the president of the company said something along the lines of production values don’t count, no one cares about slick or professionally-produced packages, all that matters is face time. The woeful aspiration to mediocrity implied by these sentiments speaks of a leadership that has no idea about what is going to happen in the short, medium or long-term future. But then again - nor does anyone else.

The Microsoft and NBC Universal News joint venture MSNBC has acquired the Newsvine community of citizen journalists for an undisclosed sum.

Newsvine, based in Seattle, publishes stories from both the mainstream media and a community of users together on the site. Users can vote on their news stories of interest, similar to the Digg or Reddit "social news" sites. Newsvine's services also include group discussions and a conversation tracker.

The site gets over one million unique visitors each month, and is currently ranked at 4,173 by Alexa (see the graph comparison with Digg and Reddit below).

For more views on the acquisition, check out Read/Write Web, CenterNetworks, and the Center for Citizen Media.