« Arthur Lee, 1945 - 2006 | Main | Iraqis blog the Middle East war » Journalism 2.0A couple of insightful posts following on the Nick Lemann "Journalism without journalists" piece in New Yorker. After posting about it, I was thinking that further discussion would be a waste of energy – thinking it's pointless for those of us who are stewing in the rich juices within the blogosphere stewpot to spend energy wrangling with those who stand outside, watching the pot boil, reluctant to jump in. However there are a good couple of follow-up posts, from Jay Rosen and Rebecca MacKinnon, that I should mention here. In "The Pros Gonna Blog You Under the Table," Jay Rosen questions the contention within some circles that professional journalists are inherently better at the blog sorta thing; that independent blogging will collapse and the web will become an "ordinary media space." But what the sweaty champions of “journalism as a form of blogging” overlook is how hard it is for your average reporter to thrive in the link-filled, argument-rich, emotionally-present, here’s-where-I-stand style that traditional bloggers have cultivated over the years. It takes time. Perhaps the hardest part is you actually have to be interested in what other people are saying. Jay notes that "some of the most prominent press bloggers, faced with the rigors of posting every day, have quietly abandoned the form...." Rebecca, in "'Real' Journalism on the Read-Write Web," responds to Nick Lemann's concluding statement in his New Yorker piece, "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." Rebecca agrees: Absolutely. Journalism schools are not going to be doing their jobs unless they're doing everything possible to help students get comfortable alongside bloggers and everybody else here on the Internet. Bloggers hang out here every day, ready to engage journalists in debate and conversation, and even to collaborate with them for the sake of a more informed public discourse. The most effective journalists of the future will find ways to utilize the Internet's read-write potential, as opposed to 20th-century media's read-only capacity. Rebecca points to another excellent responses to Lemann's piece, written by Jeff Jarvis, a successful convert from traditional to citizen media. Jeff writes about "Bigger, Better Journalism," providing a list of new possibilities for journalism on the web. I would argue that social media is evolution, not revolution. Dinosaurs may resist evolution, but eventually they get what the mammals are trying to tell them, and become birds. jon posted this at 8:44 AM |
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