Future of Newspapers?

Thought this article, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, tied in with my previous one about textbooks. A good read. Great discussion starter.

Here are a few snippets to get you interested:

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Clay Shirky, the author of the article, wrote the book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.

[via Everything is Miscellaneous]
[Image:"Newspapers": Flickr: Uploaded on October 25, 2006 by laffy4k: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/279511068/ [] Creative Commons]

Newseum: Front Pages from around the World

Every day some 500 plus newspapers from around the world send a pdf copy of their front page to the Newseum who then makes it available to all the rest of us online. Each newspaper is represented by a dot on a map. Run your cursor over the dot and the thumbnail of the page appears. Double-click that dot and you get a readable front page with links to the newspapers web page.

For you world language teachers there are newspapers from all over the world. For you historians, they have archives of specific dates of historical significance, for example, Sept 12, 2001 (day after 9-11).There is a trivia game based on current events that you could play with your class.....or during your break. I believe this could be a nifty little resource for many a classroom. Take a look.


[via Free Technology for Teachers]

[Image: Captured part of the Rocky Mountain News from the Newseum site: http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/default.asp]