Wednesday, December 19, 2007
In the future, everybody will be a journalist for fifteen minutes.
Dave Winer has some advice for today's journalists and leaders of journalists:
Obviously, neither will happen as long as journalists see bloggers as threatening upstarts and wannabe's, rather than as supplements for their own stories and as opportunities to leverage their own research skills with expert commentary.
First, reform journalism school. It's too late to be training new journalists in the classic mode. Instead, journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate. Why? Because journalism like everything else that used to be centralized is in the process of being distributed. In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen, connecting sources with readers, who in many cases are sources themselves. As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added. So what we're doing now, in journalism, as with all other intermediated professions, is decentralizing. So it pays to make an investment now and teach the educated people of the future the basic principles of journalism.
Second, embrace the best bloggers. How? Easy -- every time someone is quoted in your publication, offer them a blog hosted on your domain. This has a couple of advantages: 1. It gives the reporters the ultimate say on who gets to share some of your authority, who gets a chance to be the next amateur star. 2. It gives the reporters an incentive to only use sources that are qualified, it would improve the quality of your reporting. It also has a third benefit, as you expand the number of people writing under your banner, you also expand the reach of your publication, into school boards, local government, sports teams and businesses. It's also important because it's how you decentralize, aligning your interests with the "grain" of the web, as opposed to the current positioning, against it.
Obviously, neither will happen as long as journalists see bloggers as threatening upstarts and wannabe's, rather than as supplements for their own stories and as opportunities to leverage their own research skills with expert commentary.
Labels: Media, technology
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