Re: <nettime> TAZ THING

[Quim Gil <qgil@metamute.com>]

giorgio viali wrote:

> We need to offer Independent Journalists a way to work and survive!
> Sure!

Not so sure! 

It's not *us* needing to offer *them* a way to work and survive.
Journalists are the first interested knowing how to make
sustainable/profitable their work in an independent environment. Like
any other professional wanting to mix autonomy&ethics (this is what
"independence" is about) with business. 

What's more, is the whole journalism as a professional activity (not
just the "independent") which is struggling to understand its present
and foresee its future. 

As a journalist what do you do when the sources themselves acquire the
knowledge needed to set communication flows between them and the
audiences? What do you do when the audiences become not just audiences
but active (in various degrees) people publishing information and
organizing their own flows of communication? What do you do when
researchers feel themselves generators of accurate information and find
commercial ways to work and survive out of the classic academic spheres?
And what do you do when corporations are generating an overwhelming
amount of in/de/infra/trans/com/formation consumed by us, the
infoverdosed consumers?

Keep trying living of the independent journalism of the 70s? Become a
consultant? Retire? Explain to all the others what are they doing wrong?
Start a revolution? (not joking, all these are real examples)


I'd really like to discuss this issue. We haven't found the keys of the
new paradigm of journalism, if any. Corporate media aren't finding them
either.


> Independent media projects have to be "Web-Independent"!

I'd rather say that independent media projects will generally increase
their chances to work and survive if they are not just "web-independent"
but "support-independent". When you try to do quality journalism then a
good bite of your budget goes to pay humans that build pieces of
sensible information in the short time and a structure of flows of
communication and trust shared with other humans in the middle/long
term. 

Why limiting to a single support when the humans you are interacting
with are using lots of them? Why prepare only breakfasts when with
almost the same knowledge and infrastructure you could do lots more?

We are not talking about the so-called metadata that can be published in
your website, in your WAP, in your Palm, in your MP3 player and your
printer just pressing this key. This is an interesting first step
occurring now. But it's something like preparing great salmon & cream
cheese for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, appetiser, dessert, soup,
spread...

We are talking about conceiving information as diverse and exciting as 
ingredients and thinking of communication as something as diverse and
exciting as eating/cooking. We are talking about preparing not just an
amazing dinner to friends and relatives but suggesting menus, diets,
pic-nic's, barbecues, gastronomic trips, pudding competitions (etc) your
"customers" will die for.

If you hate industrial food you'll possibly know that the best cookery
requires small kitchens and (as my granny says) lots of love. Wherever
we find sustainable kitchens where customers are satisfied with meals
full of love we should be able to set up and run an independent media
project... But first we independent journalists will possibly need to
learn from the ways independent cooks work and survive. 

Quim Gil
http://metamute.com
"What he's said is not necessarily what Mute says" (A Fried Egg)

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