Jarvis vs. Sullivan

   Because Jarvis refuses to take a standpoint on either side of the goodness or badness of the new news model debate, it is difficult to compare Sullivan’s overtly optimistic attitude with that of the press-sphere advocate. Regardless, it is clear that both writers are very conscious of the changing times for how the news comes to us as well as how we react to it.
   Both writers give much credit to the all-powerful hyperlink for providing a quick means of connecting information to form a story with many contributing sources and without very easily-defined boundaries. Both highlight the phenomena of a link’s tendency to transform a reader into a collaborator with very little effort on the part of the reader, which, as Jarvis articulates, “changes the essential structure of a story.”
   That Sullivan describes the blogging world as “a conversation, rather than a production,” is echoed in Jarvis’ simple diagram of the “me-sphere.” Unlike Jarvis’ model of traditional news-gathering, which consists of arrows pointing in only one direction, his new model consists of a person in the midst of many external sources of information, the many multi-directional, reciprocating arrows only being implied, for the sake of a clean, uncluttered diagram.
   In another point of commonality between Sullivan and Jarvis, neither one allows himself to select one news outlet—the new, internet-dominated outlet or the old, paper-dominated outlet—as the superior, both authors instead accepting both outlets as serving separate and unique purposes in how we experience the news today.
   Sullivan and Jarvis are on the same page with regard to the topic of the changing news, the greatest disparity being the one between Sullivan’s passion and Jarvis’ apparent impartiality.