Jarvis on Stanton on Twitter

Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton is speaking today at "The Future of News" conference at Harvard Law School, where BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis just tweeted the following:

Stanton says they are going to cut the circ of the Sunday magazine in half in April to go just to the demos advertisers want.

Jarvis also twittered this...

Stanton says pay for news is "not a practical or realistic solution to our woes."

and this...

Russ Stanton is talking about how he brought the LATimes to the web as innovation officer.

Read all of Jarvis' TFON Tweets here or watch the conference here.

News unit zappa

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine says he's found a version of the thing he says will replace the news article as the "fundamental unit of news coverage."

The thing he has found is an interesting blog post by Mark Thompson called The Money Meltdown. It's a smart, clean-looking page of links to other people's work, including news articles, radio pieces and video clips. Basically, a collection of stories Thompson considers to be insightful reading/listening/viewing on the economic crisis.

Maybe I'm thick, but I don't see how a collection of stuff represents a "fundamental" unit. Thompson built his page on the original reporting of outside sources, all of which can stand on its own. Original reporting, then, is the fundamental unit.

Stitching together original stories to create a larger narrative arc is important, but it's not the revolution that Jarvis exhorts it to be. Online technology does allow for linkages that couldn't otherwise have been made at a single newspaper or television station of old, but unless some or all of that reporting is done under your own masthead, it's news coverage twice removed. As I argued in my unsolicited response to Alan Mutter's praise of Drudge Report, aggregation can be useful and illuminating, but it's hardly the thing we've been waiting for.

Jeff Jarvis loves/hates cliques

Social networking. Citizen journalism. Web 2.0. BuzzMachine is abuzz with buzz words.

A common theme in Jarvis' many posts is the power of the Internet to undo social orders he does not like and to give rise to new ones. Generally, he promotes an ostensibly democratic approach (that of the linked social network), but seems to gloss over the exclusionary, vindictive and lowest-common-denominator principles that often result from clique behavior.

What's cool in the future is what's successful (on the Internet) he tells us here: ...the lesson I prefer to take away is that the successful media brands of the future will be the ones that are owned and loved and promoted by their users (formerly known as their audience).

He's even excited about the future of air travel in the age of connectedness.

Jarvis has finally found a clique that embraces him and that he can embrace - indeed, that seems a major goal of Internet users these days. But he forgets about human nature and, sometimes, about being human.

He is right to think that the social order of today will be reorganized. But he has a tendency to believe the tools themselves will create a better society. I'm doubtful. Unless we commit ourselves to some higher principles, the new society will look a lot like the old one, only with the social pressures we suffered in high school finding new life in online.