press think

I'll be in a Professor Jay Rosen seminar much of the morning. You can join us if and when you like. The schedule allows you to set your own time and pace at Rosen's Flying Seminar In The Future of News.

As the crisis in newspaper journalism grinds on, people watching it are trying to explain how we got here, and what we’re losing as part of the newspaper economy crashes. Some are trying to imagine a new news system. I try to follow this action, and have been sending around the best of these pieces via my Twitter feed. It’s part of my experiment in mindcasting, which you can read about here.

Lately, the pace has picked up. A trigger was the March 13 appearance of Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. That essay went viral; it now has a phenomenal 686 trackbacks, making it an instant classic in the online literature about the fate of the press. As good as Shirky’s piece is (very very good, I think) “Thinking the Unthinkable” is only a piece of the puzzle, and mostly backward-pointing.

That’s why I’ve collected the following links. Together, they form a kind of flying seminar on the future of news, presented in real time. They are all from the month of March 2009. If you take the seminar, feel free to leave impressions in the comments. The “flying” part is simple: go ahead, steal these links. Spread the seminar. Get your people up to speed.

They are in the order I think you should read them.