The Past, Present and Future of the Press & the News

Jeff Jarvis defines the press-sphere as what has replaced the previous way of obtaining news, which was news stories provided through the press straight to the public. Now encompassing a wide variety of sources as opposed to the simple world-to-press-to-public scenario of the past, the present press-sphere provides a number of ways to get the news. Jarvis lists peers, media, links, government, search, companies, work, and of course still the press all as "choices we call upon" for the news. Especially with today’s technological advancements, the old ways of the news have been almost completely transformed.
Jarvis’ statement “If the news is important, it will find me,” reminded me of our class discussion on how we obtained our news. As most of us concluded, we don’t really read the newspaper or technically seek out the news as much as we maybe should. This relates to Jarvis’ previous statement and his idea that we get a lot of our news today through peers and links online. Peers transferring stories and news has contributed greatly to the change from “the way things were” to how they are now.
I thought his “New News Process” illustration and discussion was rather unusual. The idea of the actual story only being a small point on the whole process of a news story was odd to me, when the actual story is seemingly the whole point of the news. I guess it does make sense if you view this as simply the polished written story being only a small point in the whole process of developing a story, but the whole process involves the actual story (or the information part of it). It is a kind of complex idea, though I assume it is different depending on how you define the news “story” (the actual written story, or the whole idea of what is written). Also, I was confused on how this process of creating a story might differ from the "old news process," if there is one. Jarvis mentions "Text and photos come in and paper goes out...Now a story never begins and it never ends," but I didn't really understand how the actual processing of a story might have changed. The new process includes the idea itself, discussion, questions, answers, interviews, reports, story, publishing, links, corrections, comments, follow-ups. To me, most of this sounds like it has always been a part of the news process and Jarvis' idea of the old process might have been over-simplified. When the newspaper was still the main source of news, they still had discussion of the story and reports before it was published. Then, readers could submit letters or comments by mail to the newspaper. Basically I think Jarvis' "New News Process" was rather confusing, but that may just be me.
I particularly liked his explanation of how the media has changed. He says that the discussion of the future of news is too press-centric. "It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press’ problems solves news. That’s not the ecosystem of news now. There’s a fundamentally new structure to media and there are many different ways to look at it."