Trends in Journalism and Furniture
In this trendwatching podcast, Cathi Bond says she’s finally over the ’small furniture for small spaces’ trend, with this example. The Paket table is designed to fold out, kind of like furniture origami. Cathi thinks it looks like treehouse furniture, but Nora likes it. What do you think?
Meanwhile, Nora revisits a story she talked about in her column, and has talked about on Spark in the past: hyperlocal journalism, and whether it can make a go of it. She was inspired by this New York Times story on the demise of The Washington Post’s experiment in hyperlocal news. She wants Cathi’s opinion, and yours! What would you do to fix local newspapers?
Tags: design, digital economy, furniture, journalism
September 5th, 2009 at 7:15 am
I spent last weekend in Richmond, Virginia. Richmond features lots of things to do–history, the outdoors, a good cafe scene, and interesting regional and experimental music.
When I picked up the local newspaper, I expected the kind of local entertainment coverage that high-lighted all these things. Instead, the Entertainment section largely confined itself to movie listings. Here in north Texas, we have decent coverage by the large downtown paper, particularly through its “Quick’ daily freebie paper,
as well as a decent alternative and a great website run by the local classical music station. But the huge potential for hyper-local arts information has still not been achieved
I grew up in a very small town in Arkansas, with a “hyper-local” paper
which discussed everything going on in town. However, in most ways it did not contain “paid journalism” in the sense of hard-hitting exposes’, but “hyper-local” coverage in terms of upbeat community news. This form of paper perhaps anticipated the blogospheric community site, as most articles were user-generated.
Although I worry about the disappearance of “hard-hitting paid journalism”, I worry more about the demise of “hyper-local” community “news”. To me, the fallout from the disappearance of such outlets is less a matter of “truth no longer revealed” and more a matter of “culture needlessly centralized”. The way that the arts and ideas of a local area are propagated and promulgated is through “hyper-local” outlets.
The demise of free or nearly free publicity for arts and club events, as well as the demise of free or nearly free meeting/concert space, is to me
a huge problem.
I do look with trepidation at the demise of “hard news”, though the question of paper v. virtual seems to me an inessential question.
But my hope is for the hyper-local website or newspaper as the repository of local culture–and the next great hope to continue a drive to a read/write way of experiencing the arts.
As for hyper-small furniture, I worry less about the look of it than with how much of it looks as if it would break upon any sitting.
September 5th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Thanks for this Gurdonark. It’s an interesting point; the demise of the local and specific culturally, rather than just from a news p.o.v., and I think you’re quite right. Cheers