Monday, April 04, 2011

The new Reformation

This cracks me up: the German press is having it out with the government’s press office because a spokesperson announced Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to the U.S. on Twitter before it was announced to the press in a traditional news conference.

It’s a little hard to tell from the translation but some members of the media seem pretty pissy about it. The communications guy holding the press conference isn’t having any of it. I wonder if there’s video. I’d like to hear the tone and see the body language in that exchange.

I heard about it in a retweet of Jay Rosen by Dave Winer so I’m hoping they will talk about it on today’s Rebooting the News podcast.

Dave did a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it struck me that he mentioned a reformation of the news media. I thought at the time that it is something like the Protestant Reformation in the sense that both are partly about disintermediation. Providing the Bible and holding services in the language of the people was meant to put them in more direct contact with their religion by cutting out middleman priests and the Latin scripture and liturgy which was understood only by the educated classes.

It all came full circle in little neural connections this morning when seeing Dave’s twitter handle fired off a reminder of the podcast, and the circle was cemented by the irony that that other reformation began in Germany.