A totally intriguing “What if”


The news about a content sharing agreement between Tennessee’s four largest newspapers brought some fascinating Twitter comments from Jay Rosen, the influential New York University journalism professor, and Kent Flanagan, now at Middle Tennessee State University, but formerly the Associated Press’ bureau chief in Nashville.

Some snippets:

Rosen: What would happen if you hooked up to that content-sharing agreement in Tennessee the state’s largest J-schools?

Flanagan:  I’ve already approached other j-schools about starting online news a la CUNY’s NYC’s news bureau … with fewer decent internships available, i feel students need another venue to show prospective employers what they can do. … my plan is to emphasize new media skills and encourage more than basic text from all students participating … in a democracy, we need more voices covering state capitol news, not less, and that’s what I am aiming for.

Rosen: Another piece ‘o puzzle. Take Knoxville’s good relations with the blogosphere; spread those across the system.

Check their Twitter pages in the links above for more of their conversation.

A newsgathering network that utilized the resources of multiple newspapers, students at Journalism Schools and indy bloggers in a loosely coordinated way would be quite a new model.

Rosen had some more thoughts in a podcast interview Sunday with Dave Winer. Listen to a the clip from the podcast below where he mentions the content sharing of among Tennessee newspapers and how it might be expanded into something more interesting.

Dave Wner asks Jay Rosen “So how we gonna fix this?”


The whole podcast is great, give it a listen.

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