Tim Carmody explains:
How journalists communicate has been radically changed by the Internet. Is it time for the academic world to catch up?
Today, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University launches PressForward, a new discovery portal and publishing platform for scholarship and intellectual discussion on the web.
The big idea of PressForward is to create a digital-first alternative to the cumbersome mechanisms of traditional gatekeepers — academic journals — while keeping main benefits of print publication and peer review: their ability to concentrate a community’s attention around the best emergent writing and research. The project is bankrolled through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Digital Information Technology program. […]
The team behind PressForward is likewise a blend of researchers, journalists, and publishers, spanning science, business, and humanities — all equally at home in the worlds of scholarship and the web. Besides CHNM’s Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, PressForward’s advisory board includes two journalists: The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, and Adam Aston, former editor at BusinessWeek and The Economist. […]
[I]ncreasingly, new media journalists are producing material that looks more like scholarship, and scholars are producing material that looks more like journalism.
