2nd Talk: Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll - Journalism and Discourse Without Newspapers

The second TEDxNCSU talk is Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll on Journalism and Discourse Without Newspapers.

They are now going into how the internet killed the newspaper. He is mentioning Craigslist, circulation numbers, ad revenue, and free news aggregators. He moved into the unbundling of news in the internet age. People are now able to get the specific content they are looking for.

He moved onto the response from newspapers in reducing hard news and moving towards lighter fare. Shows that that statehouse coverage has decreased 32% since 2003 and how this makes corruption easier to get away with.

Erick is now speaking about the absence of newspapers and the lack of real news media in the U.S. He starts about the need for rapidity and brevity in modern news and how this makes news less reliable (<50% of online articles aren't fully edited).Online articles are also half the length of their dead tree counterparts. People now choose news sources that agree with their pre-existing ideologies.

He's now going into how Sarah Palin invented "death panels" and how it was quickly rebuked by most media sources, but pushed by Fox News. But, still 50% of Americans accepted they existed since no method existed to explain to the American public. The new media landscape allows mistruths to spread quickly and removes almost all means to correct lies and conspiracies.

Chase is back saying 85% of online news originated in newspapers and how online news is "news junk food".

Erick is proposing solutions to save journalism such as pay-walls and ad revenue. He's going into non-profit and public funding. U.S. currently has lowest per capita funding towards public media of any western nation. The whole discussion is pretty pessimistic, but hard to argue with.

I am approaching battery life problems, so I'm going to have to use pen and paper and come back.