A new kind of journalist
Jeff Jarvis says we'll soon see the rise of a new kind of journalist, "who gathers and sifts and vets and shares and guides and goads -- and does all that not just with beat reporters but with beat citizens: readers turned writers."
His vision of the job description of the city editor of the future:
1. Aggregate, organize, and highlight the best of newsroom and citizen media: good reporting, good story ideas, new viewpoints, public pulse points.
2. Make assignments inside and outside the newsroom: You need someone to cover a school-board meeting where there's a controversy brewing, you might allocate one of your staff reporters. For another meeting, you might go out to bid with citizen information entrepreneurs, picking someone who has your trust because she has training and a track record. For another meeting, you know that the event will be covered by citizens anyway -- some with a stated viewpoint -- and you'll aggregate those. But you'll make sure that what needs to be covered gets covered. The insiders will be on salary. The outsiders may get a payment or may be part of your company's ad network or may just get promotion that benefits them when they sell the ads.
3. Identify, train, and support reporting talent: What you have done in the newsroom, you will need to do outside. You will find promising and motivated citizen reporters and put the best into a company training program -- or take the best from journalism schools that now serve the industry and the public with citizen training. On an ongoing basis, you will work with this distibuted reporting base to improve their work. You won't be able to edit every line of every report to which you link, but you will try to educate them -- and earn their respect as they earn yours.
4. Share news anywhere, anytime, in any medium: You will package and enable news gatherers to share news as it happens in and through any appropriate medium -- text, photo, audio, video, conversation, shared resources.
5. Converse: It's important to stay in conversation with the community: Get out, meet people, read their blogs, read their comments, respond to them, be a member of the community.
Jul 18, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(1)
Discussion
1 comments about 'A new kind of journalist'Well, you know what's really going to happen:
"staff/salaried" reporters will be phased out in favor of unpaid "citizen" journalists;
whether "trained" or "trusted" this "new kind of journalist" (especially the unpaid ones)will present problems of verity and objectivity; more corrections will ensue; engendering even less trust in journalism as only the advocate types will want to do the work for next-to nothing.
Believe me, I started my career as a citizen radio journalist 25 years ago (I had the degree, not the job). At first, the staff editor was happy to take my contributions for no money. Then radio news went away almost completely (except for national NPR and all-news stations).
Tell me, what's the difference between "news", "content" and "filler"?
It's the willingness of someone to pay for it.
ao'd
Posted by Arthur O'Donnell at August 5, 2005 4:09 PM
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