Recommended Reading

March 16th, 2009 by zen

Here ya go…..

Top Billing! Clay Shirky – Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

This post made a HUGE impact on the journalism and tech blogospheres. It’s quite good.

Fabius Maximus – A solution to 4GW – the introduction

A robust discussion of 4GW by FM, including a large number of comments on the post including those by Col. GI Wison and Dr. Chet Richards.

DNI – Watch ADM on BookTV

Boyd acolytes and military reformers Tom Christie, Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey discuss America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress which was re-issued under the prestigious brand of Stanford University Press.

ICSR – Countering Online Radicalisation: A Strategy for Action (PDF)

Nick Carr – Realtime kills real space

The asocial shift of mobile social media technology.

SWJ Blog – Special Warfare – 1962

A little military history in a primary source doc

John Hagel – With Liberty and Talent for All

Hagel is always good.

That’s it!

Posted in recommended reading, Uncategorized | 7 comments

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  1. Lexington Green:

    March 16th, 2009 at 3:30 am

    Brilliant Shirkey piece.  He only leaves out one thing.  The dying incumbents are going to successfully seek money and protection from the government.  With a Democrat president and congress, their faithful allies, lickspittles, bootlickers, toadies, buttboys, catamites, lackeys also knows as "the media" will come to DC with palm extended, upright, demanding the payment that their partisan loyalty has earned.  They will get protection and money. 
    .
    They will not survive that much longer as a result.

  2. zen:

    March 16th, 2009 at 3:37 am

    Lex you get the first Zenpundit William F. Buckley Memorial Award for the use of "catamite" in a partisan zinger. 🙂

  3. Around the Web: Reactions to ICSR Report « ubiwar . conflict in n dimensions:

    March 16th, 2009 at 2:37 pm

    […] Recommended Reading, Zenpundit, 16 March 2009 […]

  4. democratic core:

    March 16th, 2009 at 6:18 pm

    The Shirky piece raises fascinating issues.  The question of what the new economic model for journalism will be is interesting, and I appreciate the fact that this piece raises the question explicitly.  Contrary to Lexington’s comment, I doubt that there will be a government bailout, as the First Amendment issues would seem to make that unpalatable to both parties.  The non-profit approach is one logical evolution, where "newspapers", i.e., centers of journalistic activites, get absorbed into non-profit institutions such as think tanks or universities to provide content to organs of information dissemination.  Another model might be the C-span model, where profitable internet organizations such as Google fund the entities we used to call "newspapers" in order to provide content for the web.  Most likely, you could have some combination of the two, as for example in the way that profit-making organizations subsidize research activities by non-profit institutions such as universities. 

  5. Lexington Green:

    March 17th, 2009 at 1:12 am

    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/16/MNIA16GCBO.DTL
    .
    Pelosi tells the DOJ that news organizations should be allowed to violate the anti-trust laws.  "We must ensure that our policies enable our news organizations to survive and to engage in the news gathering and analysis that the American people expect."
    .
    It is not a cash handout.   Yet. 
    .
    That does not concern me.  If the Obama administration throws a few billion down the toilet to subsidize the existing, legacy media dinosauria, who cares?  We throw tens, hundreds of billions down the crapper around here, and its no big deal.  In fact, as Dr. Frank N. Furter once sang, "it’s stimulating".
    .
    My bigger concern is that the US Gov and/or leftist groups are going to try to shut down alternative media that is not allied to the Obama Administration and the Democrats.   The absurdly labelled Fairness Doctrine is one option.  We will see a lot of that.  Preserving and expanding a pro-Obama, pro-Donk Party media monopoly can be accomplished all kinds of ways.  Stay tuned. 

  6. zen:

    March 18th, 2009 at 2:43 am

    Hi democratic core,
    .
    Jay Rosen of Press Think spent a lot of time on Twitter discussing the Shirky piece. I think your suggestion as to going non profit is quite reasonable. A newspaper/journalism entity is easily eligible for a 503(3)(c) designation though they’d have to avoid specific partisan endorsements during elections.
    .
    As a practical matter, I’m quite certain the partisan mags – National Review, The New Republic, The Nation, Weekly Standard etc. have never or only very rarely showed a profit

  7. zen:

    March 18th, 2009 at 2:49 am

    Lex,
    .
    I expect targeting of alternative media through the back door or a layering of indirect constraints and costs that suffocate the popular operators without deep pockets and raise barriers to entry. It’s not just about tilting Left but strengthening gatekeepers to public discourse. They will try to peel off the elite establishment Right voices from "the base" or at least the middle class voices in the base. I also see this as a more important priority for the Left netroots/Soros funded activists than Obama personally as his strategy seems to be to be preventing the GOP from becoming energized around a hot button issue