Guardian, Emily Bell:

When the predictive superstar Nate Silver announced last summer that he would defect from the New York Times, it began a wave of new, new money-backed “personal brand” journalism startups that launch in earnest with FiveThirtyEight on ESPN next week. This was supposed to be a good thing. “A very luxurious situation” indeed.

When word leaked a few months later that the billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar would be joining forces with Glenn Greenwald, he had to clarify that the then-unnamed First Look Media would amount to something bigger than one man, a “long-term effort to build a new and exciting platform for journalism” and contribute to “the greater good”.

To be sure, the internet has presented journalists with an extraordinary opportunity to remake their own profession. And the rhetoric of the new wave of creativity in journalism is spattered with words that denote transformation. But the new micro-institutions of journalism already bear the hallmarks of the restrictive heritage they abandoned with such glee. 

Remaking journalism in its own image, only with better hair and tighter clothes, is not a revolution, or even an evolution. It is a repackaging of the status quo with a very nice clubhouse attached. A revolution calls for a regime change of more significant depth.

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