Posts tagged Boczkowski

I happened to catch a presentation to the Nieman Lab by Pablo Boczkowski, the Northwestern professor who studies news production and how it is changing in a digital environment. It was a good enough lecture but I got the impression Pablo had not spent a great deal of time in any newspaper with a pulse.

The whale in question was “the gap between what journalists write and readers read” … as if this was a somehow by-product of digital media rather than a long-standing (if inconvenient) truth.

To give him his due, Boczkowski comes clean to being a trained ethnographer — and so not someone accustomed to providing anyone with a compelling reason to either purchase a newspaper or buy some advertising space in it.

Still, cogent as the presentation is, it ignores the fact that journalists have more or less “never” written what people want. Just that some were fortunate enough to live at a time when the print media’s relationship with their geographically relevant advertisers still had a modicum of value.

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