The role of journalist is dead.
I am a journalist and this scares me. I am also relieved to see this happen. While I still believe in "legacy journalism," I am excited by the prospect of the journalist as a human. The New Journalist writes the straight copy, but can also have an opinion of their own -- even reactions to news events.
We are the picture takers and the news writers, but we are not cruel, emotionless people.
We write the stories, but that doesn't mean we're not affected by what we report. If we report good stories, heartbreaking stories, we go home and lament the world, too.
Yet, this is what we journalists have been billed as: vultures feeding on society for our next story.
I am a journalist and this scares me. I am also relieved to see this happen. While I still believe in "legacy journalism," I am excited by the prospect of the journalist as a human. The New Journalist writes the straight copy, but can also have an opinion of their own -- even reactions to news events.
We are the picture takers and the news writers, but we are not cruel, emotionless people.
We write the stories, but that doesn't mean we're not affected by what we report. If we report good stories, heartbreaking stories, we go home and lament the world, too.
Yet, this is what we journalists have been billed as: vultures feeding on society for our next story.
What we really do (and what I like about this evolving
profession) is engage society in conversations about our world. We're
changing how we "discuss" things -- by blog, newspaper, radio, etc. --
but despite format, journalists are finding ways to express
ourselves, too. Especially through blogs.
The mass platform for anyone to broadcast their thoughts these days are blogs. While there are "professional blogs," the major complaint about blogs are not their personal and conversational tones, but the accuracy.
Ahh, the accuracy; it's something to seriously question when reading a
blog. What is great about a blog (and bloggers) is how they make
readers think -- much like traditional journalism. In the Sarah Palin "Who's Trig's real mother?"
scandal, the facts presented by blogs were definitely screwy. But it took bloggers to
point out the oddities in Palin's background to bring the press
scurrying to find out why, exactly, did Palin seem off. Bloggers kicked up a storm with Palin's background and rightly so. Is America really ready to help elect a once-Secessionist, pro-lifer, book banner? These are all rarely things a politician would admit up front -- at least without the legions of devoted Internet background sleuths and reporters at Palin's front door.
So where is political writing heading these days, with big bad blogs on the horizon, (some true, but mostly false) whistle blowing and policing candidates? Are journalists on their way out, much in the way of scribes?
I mentioned at the beginning of my post that journalists, as we know them, are dead. I said this to shock and to get people thinking of journalists and journalism as an evolving profession. If we stick with Shirky's example of scribes -- who couldn't evolve past their lifelong duty of writing manuscripts -- if journalists were to stick merely to what they know, who's to say our profession won't be completely dead in a few years? In this new world of citizen journalism, what we lack is a business model to compete, but most journalists have a sense to know that blogging is not the death of journalism. As long as we keep a dialogue going about our society, journalism will live on.
(Photo of Sarah Palin by Flickr/scriptingnews)
The mass platform for anyone to broadcast their thoughts these days are blogs. While there are "professional blogs," the major complaint about blogs are not their personal and conversational tones, but the accuracy.
Ahh, the accuracy; it's something to seriously question when reading a
blog. What is great about a blog (and bloggers) is how they make
readers think -- much like traditional journalism. In the Sarah Palin "Who's Trig's real mother?"
scandal, the facts presented by blogs were definitely screwy. But it took bloggers to
point out the oddities in Palin's background to bring the press
scurrying to find out why, exactly, did Palin seem off. Bloggers kicked up a storm with Palin's background and rightly so. Is America really ready to help elect a once-Secessionist, pro-lifer, book banner? These are all rarely things a politician would admit up front -- at least without the legions of devoted Internet background sleuths and reporters at Palin's front door.So where is political writing heading these days, with big bad blogs on the horizon, (some true, but mostly false) whistle blowing and policing candidates? Are journalists on their way out, much in the way of scribes?
I mentioned at the beginning of my post that journalists, as we know them, are dead. I said this to shock and to get people thinking of journalists and journalism as an evolving profession. If we stick with Shirky's example of scribes -- who couldn't evolve past their lifelong duty of writing manuscripts -- if journalists were to stick merely to what they know, who's to say our profession won't be completely dead in a few years? In this new world of citizen journalism, what we lack is a business model to compete, but most journalists have a sense to know that blogging is not the death of journalism. As long as we keep a dialogue going about our society, journalism will live on.
(Photo of Sarah Palin by Flickr/scriptingnews)
By Matthew Richmond
September 4, 2008 12:33 PM
i agree completely. in fact, i think that the scribe analogy is kind of crappy. journalists never merely sat there and transcribed events as they happened. the internet is killing off the printing press operator, maybe, but there will always be a place for a hard-working, talented journalist who finds stories and reports them in an engaging, thorough way.