Category Archives: Media 2.0

01.01.08
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What is an online journalist?

Craig McGill recently asked: What is an online journalist?

So what should a digital/online reporter be? Should they go out on stories alongside print reporters and basically be someone who takes video, pictures and audio soundbites and then files it back to the office? Should they also be editing that content just as a wordsmith edits his words? Or should all of that be the work of the reporter and there shouldn’t be an online tag? Said reporter then comes back to the office and crafts/edits the words and everything else? Seems like a lot of work for one person.

It caused me to think, because I have always defined myself as an online journalist, despite the fact that I was trained as a newspaper journalist and for most of my career I worked for a public service broadcaster, the BBC. Yet by 1999, just five years into my career, I had already worked in every major news medium: Newspapers, television, radio and the internet.

I will admit that my motivation for the self-definition has been, in part, an act of defiance, a professional statement to the high priests of the Church of Journalism that, despite the perceived power and importance of newspapers and television, I chose to work online. Why defiance? I made the move online in 1996. A couple of years later, when I considered moving back to newspapers, my experience was dismissed as if my work online didn’t count. Even computer-savvy journalists, even back in 1998, told me that I would have to chose between technical work and journalism. Instead I forged my own path at the BBC.

There I covered stories for radio, television and online, such as the Microsoft anti-trust trial and the dot.com boom. For years, I had a slot on BBC 5 Live talking about technology and the internet, and I covered US politics, current affairs and entertainment for the website. There wasn’t a binary decision to be made about whether to be online or be a journalist, whether to be technical or editorial – I was both. Any field journalist knows technical knowledge is a requirement for the job: If you can’t get your story, your audio and your video back to the office, the quality of the journalism does’t matter.

After the dot.com crash, I watched as many of my online journalism colleagues were laid off, their divisions gutted, downsized or destroyed. Most of them were so disenchanted with the experience that they left journalism entirely. In 2002, the BBC News website did a Q&A – the questions came from the site’s readers – with Peter Jennings in the New York studios of ABC News. After the interview, Mr Jennings took us to the online department, introduced us to the staff and showed us their work with collegial pride. He grumbled that “the Mouse (Disney)”, ABC’s corporate parent, didn’t value their work much and was cutting staff.

It’s an attitude that is still common in journalism today, even if the number of digital staff is increasing. You can see it in the responses to Craig’s question, for example, the journalists who believe that their online colleagues do little more than “type the stories up for the web”. It’s about as dismissive as Truman Capote saying that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was not writing but merely typing.

In the early part of this decade, I remember talking to university classes in the Washington DC area where I was based. They would ask how they could get a job like mine, and I had to tell the students that my job was one of a handful of editorial online positions. At that time, most online positions merely re-purposed content from newspapers or broadcasters for rather unimaginative websites. A large number of the sites that provided original news reporting for the web got wiped out in the crash. It was content on the web, not of the web, but not by choice of the journalists, rather, it was due to lack of vision by the editors and management who were so focused on the present that they never looked up to see the future.

Beginning just a couple of years ago, that changed. Broadband had reached a tipping point in the United States, western Europe and many parts of Asia. Despite the dot.com crash, people had continued to make the internet an important part of their lives. News organisations woke up from their post-crash schadenfreude to realise that the internet hadn’t died. Yes, it might have been a victim of irrational exuberence by some, and get-rich mania by others, but the medium had continued to grow and develop.

Now, some newspapers find the shoe on the other foot. The internet continues to rise as a medium and newspapers and their business are in decline.

I guess this is all a rather roundabout way to explain not what is means to be an online journalist, but for me, why the self-definition as an online journalist means more than a job description.

So back to Craig’s original question. What is an online journalist? Craig asked several people to answer the question, including Bryan Murley of the Innovation in College Media blog. Bryan said:

I see an online journalist as one more in mindset than anything. A page designer can be a good online journalist, if given permission. A photographer can be an online journalist or a stick-in-the-mud.

I would have to agree, and it reminds me of Rob Curley’s about the importance of mindset rather than skillset. You can learn to do anything, but you need to have an open mind, professional curiosity, and a passion to try new things and to learn from your experiments.

Throughout most of my career, and even still today, I have to explain that my background is journalism and not computers. I have only taken one computer course in my life, Pascal in high school, and I dropped it after one semester. Since coming to the UK, I have found an anti-technology attitude here that is alien to me. If you use a computer, the media believes that you must be a ‘boffin’ or some pasty, anti-social creature who prefers the company of computers to people. Suw has wondered if this is down to the culture within the university education system which has a history of pitting science against the humanities, and most people in the media have humanities degrees. It’s odd because you can’t walk into a newsroom and not see a computer, but computers still don’t fit into the sense of self of many journalists.

I know my way around a computer and the internet, but I don’t know much about Flash or database programming. I’m a cut-and-paste coder not a developer. I know more about multimedia than I do about developing web applications. I know much more about remote comms than most because so much of my career has been learning how to file from anywhere.

But I know what’s possible, and I know the importance of working with people who know what I don’t. I know that working with a good team can achieve not only what is possible now but redefine what is going to be possible. I know that online journalism is not a mature medium like newspapers, radio and television. It evolves constantly and is still developing forms, styles, conventions and a grammar. That is what excites online journalists. It’s blogs and social networks now, but in a few years, it will be something entirely new.

That is why, through good times and bad, I choose to work online. Yes, the naysayers and the curmudgeons annoy me. The red mist still descends when uninformed people dismiss the internet as a journalistic medium. But I have more than 10 years now of working online for two of the most successful, prestigious news websites in the world. Personally, I don’t feel the need to justify my journalistic credentials to anyone, although there are people in the profession who still ask me to do so.

But there are more innovative and imaginative people to work with now than a few years ago. There are more of us who know what the web is capable of and are eager to just get on with it. That’s why I’m looking forward to 2008. After a lot of groundwork, I’ve got a couple of projects to really sink my teeth into, to explore what is possible with some excellent partners. I can’t wait. Happy New Year!

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12.21.07
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Simple questions can create a great debate

Steve Peterson at The Bivings Report pointed out a post on National Public Radio’s The Bryant Park Project that posed a simple question: Who Are Ron Paul’s Supporters?

For those of you who don’t know, Ron Paul is a Representative from Texas running for president as a Republican, although he ran as a Libertarian in 1988. The political outsider broke a one-day fund-raising effort, pulling in US$6m on 16 December. The Republican establishment and the mainstream media are a bit baffled by his candidacy. However, listening to some of his political statements, he reminds me sometimes of Warren Beatty’s character Bulworth, a suicidally disillusioned liberal politician who becomes bluntly honest. (UPDATE: Just to clarify. Warren Beatty’s character was liberal. I didn’t mean to say that Ron Paul was liberal. Personally, I think his politics doesn’t fit tidily into the liberal-conservative spectrum.)

The response to the question was overwhelming, so much so that they had to shut off comments after 4,000 flooded in. The show’s producers called it Ron Paul-valanche. As I said to Steve via e-mail and he posted the Bivings’ blog:

I have often said to our journalists that only a fraction of our audience will respond to [a] traditional article, and often those responses won’t add much to the story. However, by guiding the discussion with a simple question or some framing of the debate or issue, I think participation not only increases but it’s also broader and more diverse.

Ron Paul’s supporters, well known for being vocal and very active online, swarmed the post, but answered the question in quite some detail, providing a great snap shot of the presidential candidate’s supporters. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Representative Paul’s supporters have a Google alert-driven flashmob system set up that directs them to blog posts, videos and other discussions online to show their support.

But this is still an amazing response, and as I told Steve, they might be able to take this one step further. You could try to extract some of the information in the comments, probably by mining the underlying database that runs the blog. They could extract information such as age and location of the commenters in this thread to do some interesting mash-ups showing supporter distribution by age and state. It would provide some structure to that information and help to show patterns in it.

This idea is so simple. It is a great use of a programme blog. As I say to Guardian journalists, blog posts are great in framing a debate around a piece of traditional journalism or in reflecting a debate online or off-line. A traditional piece of reporting ties together as many threads as possible, but a great blog post teases out threads for a discussion.

This post asked a simple question and got a great response. To me, this post is an act of journalism, but instead of asking a handful of people on the street or over the phone a question, you’ve posed the question publicly and heard from thousands of people.

12.21.07
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‘Working at the speed of news, not the speed of the press’

As I recently wrote, newspapers can break news again, but some journalists are resisting the shift. Here in the UK, there is a feeling amongst some that this would turn them into little more than ‘wire reporters’. Their words not mine. They think that breaking news has to be sensationalist, shoddy and often, wrong. But why?

Alan Mutter took Omaha World-Journal to task for its poor online coverage of a recent shooting at a shopping mall. Alan wrote:

Even though newspapers are no longer part of everyone’s daily information-consuming routine, they still rank among the first places many people will turn during a powerful and emotional event like the Omaha shootings. If the newspaper delivers a timely, compelling and sensitive report, it has a good chance of winning new fans and influencing advertisers to ship more dollars their way. When it fails, as Omaha.Com did, it reinforces the concept that newspapers are irrelevant has-beens.

But the comments demonstrate some of this bias against breaking news, even though Alan took care to say that the coverage should be sensitive.

Chuck Kershner, who says that he spent 25 years as a photo-journalist with Reuters and UPI and now publishes a weekly in New York, said:

However, to confuse a newspaper with a wannabe wire service version on the internet is I believe unfair if Omaha’s ‘core’ business is newspapering not interneting.

Surely, their core business is journalism, not interneting or newspapering? And also, doesn’t it make sense to grow your business by smart use of the internet as a publishing and participation medium, doing things you can’t do in print?

Chuck also asserts that the New York Times has suffered as a paper since its focus has shifted to the internet. Have I got news for you Chuck, their focus has shifted to the internet because their business is shifting to the internet. I met the publisher of the International Herald Tribune last year, and their strategy was to grow the online business as quickly as possible. If they have five to 10 years to make that happen, he said the New York Times was OK. If they only had three to five years to do that, well, they might just be out of the journalism business, not just the ‘newspapering’ business.

I can understand the bias against breaking news, especially in the US where on screen graphics shout BREAKING NEWS and television news, especially local TV, can be really poor. But instead of breaking news – a term which comes with baggage – think timely, accurate information, and I think it puts a different cast on things. And let’s be clear and get away from the binary thinking of breaking news versus in-depth investigations. The internet allows both immediacy and depth. Breaking news does not have to be exploitative or sensationalist. You don’t have to engage in ‘breaking rumour’, as some of my former colleagues at the BBC called it. Credibility is still our greatest asset.

From the negative to a positive example, Mindy McAdams pointed out a great piece from the Carol Goodhue, the readers’ representative at the San Diego Union-Tribune. In the piece, Gathering news not only for the next day but for now, she said other news organisations asked of their breaking news team: “How do so few do so much so quickly?” The answer is:

Team members confer with their editors frequently, but they often edit postings for each other, and they don’t wait for assignments or debate whether to head out for a promising story.

Karen Kucher, one of the original members of the team and an assistant editor, said, “Our default is supposed to be to go.” …

She and another team member, Angelica Martinez, both said they’re constantly educating sources accustomed to the slower pace of newspapers. Martinez said, “It’s not a 5 o’clock deadline, it’s now – right now.”

On top of that though, they challenge the tawdry image of breaking news.

(Editor Tom) Mallory said, “I’ve never experienced more gratitude from readers for anything we’ve done in journalism than for the simple postings on the news blog, three or four paragraphs at a time, of reliable, confirmed information, sortable by area.”

They also use their blogs to improve their journalism, scanning comments for follow up questions. This is a must read piece chock full of not only the how’s but also the why’s of creating a breaking news team.

Mindy was tipped off to the Union Tribune column by Michael Grant at the blog The Moderate Voice. He was gobsmacked that journalists would ask the question of how can so few do so much so fast. Michael says:

For 500 years, newspaper journalists had 24 hours to work with in any given news cycle, and it was unthinkable to expect them to do more. Morning papers had their staffs, and evening papers had their staffs. With all that time, it was reasonable that newspaper guys would forget exactly how fast journalism is designed to work. … To journalists now working for online news teams – the U-T’s was created in May, 2005 – it must be like a really cool rediscovery of their natural speed, and how easy it is to do journalism at 150 mph.

As a journalist, the possibility of doing journalism at 150 mph was one of the things that excited me about blogging and the technology that supports it. Granted, just as with a car, the margin for error is less the faster you go, but that is why you have editorial standards and process in place, and the Union-Tribune shows hows it’s done.

Blogging technology allows almost friction-less filing from the field. I’m pushing to use blogging APIs for remote access for our new CMS because it will ease publishing for field journalists and speed publishing for all of our journalists and we can use light-weight off-line blogging tools like Flock, MarsEdit or Ecto, which I’m using to write this.

Veron Strachen, a digital native and colleague of mine at the Guardian, said that in the past, newspaper journalists used to work at the speed of the press. The Guardian is moving to 24/7 working, which is a major shift. Now, with the internet as a global publishing platform, Veron said that we’ll be working not at the speed of the press, but at the speed of news.

12.11.07
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Commissioning for audiences not platforms

I got a late call on Monday inviting me to the roll out of Channel 4 Education’s new line-up. Hats off to Steve Moore for mentioning me and getting me invited. Steve thought I should be there because Channel 4 was shifting its educational focus from TV to other interactive platforms including social networks, online games and consoles.

The Media Guardian’s Jemima Kiss has the full write up (Yes, the Guardian is my day job):

Channel 4 has unveiled a slate of “high risk and experimental” projects based around social networking sites that it says will tackle the crisis of motivation in education.

The new commissions for 2008 – announced today – are part of the £6m educational budget for 14- to 19-year-olds which involves Channel 4 dropping much of its TV programming in favour of online projects.

What impressed me were a few things that Matt Locke and Alice Taylor – both ex-BBC and now Channel 4 Education – said about the process. Matt said that when they were thinking about the projects, they focused on five characteristics:

  • About being playful. That’s not about being trivial, but about participation. Matt says that this teen audience does things without permission such as creating blogs, podcasts or their own music. They do this without training. “This is about playful exploration.”
  • A social element. Teens go through a lot of change 14-19. They are trying out different selves and normally getting feedback from other teens, their parents and teachers. But now there are so many ways for teens to experiment with themselves and get feedback from a much broader context. Many projects will have social network component, but not just because social networks are the new media fascination de jour, Matt said. Social networks will provide teens with this broader context for social feedback.
  • Exploration. BBC tells you what you need to know. Channel 4 helps you ask the right questions.
  • The projects are built around tools and spaces that teens use – Bebo, MySpace, Flickr or YouTube – instead of creating our own tools
  • They had to be fun.

But the big thing that Matt said was about cross-platform commissioning:

Cross platform commissioning is not about asking: Is it tele or is it web? But where is the audience? We have to commission for our audience wherever they are.

That’s huge. That’s platform-busting, open thinking. That’s the kind of thing that explodes content silos and realises the real revolution in digital content. It gets us past the newspaper versus TV, internet versus newspapers, this versus world of false platform choices. I also think that Matt’s formulation of focussing on the audience translates well to content makers who might otherwise be sceptical of cross-platform commissioning.

Alice did some ground-breaking research for the BBC, and I could tell both from Matt and Alice that they were excited at being able to put their ideas into practice. The Channel 4 Education projects will involve alternate reality games and Alice is keen to consider not only the internet but also consoles and handhelds.

If you’re a journalist and you think that games aren’t something to consider, look at World Without Oil. It was a “collaborative alternate reality simulating an oil shock”. ARGs can be like strategic games used by business, government and the military. They get people to consider scenarios and outcomes.

One of Channel 4’s game will be called Ministry, an online, networked ARG that challenges teens to think about online privacy and identity and how they apply to their lives. How do you develop trust with people you can’t see? Do you think about the information that you are posting online when it “remains persistent and public”? Those are issues that everyone, not just teens, should be thinking about.

They are also considering widgets not as signs of consumption but as a nuanced form of self-expression. Matt, Alice and the rest of the Channel 4 Education team have set themselves and ambitious agenda, and from the questioning, they face some scepticism from traditional educational circles. But they are moving into new areas, and they don’t have established models to use. Not everything will be a raging success, but they have a three to four year plan that will incorporate feedback from the projects and teens uptake and participation.

I also think Janey Walker, Channel 4’s Head of Education, challenged (possibly inadvertently) the idea that to cope with the dizzying array of choice that people have when it comes to information and entertainment that quality is the only solution. She said that Channel 4 Education had been making quality programmes but showing them when teens weren’t at home. TVs were being taken out of schools, and teachers were reluctant to push play on the VCR or DVD player to show a half hour programme. What happens if you make great, quality programming and no one is watching it?

As Matt says, it’s not about tele or the web, or 360 commissioning but about taking your content where the audience is. You can’t do what you’ve always done and hope or think that sooner or later people will consumer your content the way you want them to.

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12.07.07
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CNET, Gamespot and Jeff Gerstmann: Controversy or conspiracy theory?

On Wednesday, I spotted a post from Michael O’Connor Clarke about Jeff Gerstmann, a games reviewer and Editorial Director at CNET‘s Gamespot, who appeared to have been fired for giving a bad review to Kane & Lynch. The game’s publishers, Eidos Interactive, had just bought hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising on the site and the rumour was that they used the weight of that contract to force CNET to fire Gerstmann. It seems the news was broken in this Penny Arcade strip.

Here’s Gerstmann’s review:

The implications of this rumour are clear: If CNET is bowing to pressure from advertisers to ensure that their own games are favourable reviewed, then CNET’s games coverage becomes not worth the electricity that lights its pixels. Indeed, the suspicion that CNET can be bought immediately devalues all its reviews, across all sectors. If the PR, advertising and editorial departments submit to bullying from one vendor, then there’s no reason why they aren’t doing the same for other vendors. This is potentially very damaging for CNET as it destroys readers’ confidence that what they are getting is honest, unbiased opinion.

As Kotaku says:

As our tipster points out, if the rumor is true, it could point to a distressing precedent at Gamespot and parent company CNet. “As writers of what is supposed to be objective content, this is our worst nightmare coming to life,” wrote the tipster.

Our efforts to confirm the story with Gamespot haven’t proved successful. Our current requests with PR, Gerstmann and other CNet contacts have either gone unanswered or yielded a “no comment.”

But rather than address the rumours head-on, CNET shilly-shallied about:

CNET allowed hours to pass by as people continued to spread word of the firings, creating incensed users everywhere. They issued no formal statement and made no attempt to defuse the situation. Eventually, they came out with what I refer to as a “non-denial denial,” in which they made no reference to the controversial situation, resorting to generalized statements about how CNET is a bastion of “unbiased reviews.”

And the first formal response on Gamespot is a masterpiece of not really saying anything:

Due to legal constraints and the company policy of GameSpot parent CNET Networks, details of Gerstmann’s departure cannot be disclosed publicly. However, contrary to widespread and unproven reports, his exit was not a result of pressure from an advertiser.

“Neither CNET Networks nor GameSpot has ever allowed its advertising business to affect its editorial content,” said Greg Brannan, CNET Networks Entertainment’s vice president of programming. “The accusations in the media that it has done so are unsubstantiated and untrue. Jeff’s departure stemmed from internal reasons unrelated to any buyer of advertising on GameSpot.”

“Though he will be missed by his colleagues, Jeff’s leaving does not affect GameSpot’s core mission of delivering the most timely news, video content, in-depth previews, and unbiased reviews in games journalism,” said Ryan MacDonald, executive producer of GameSpot Live. “GameSpot is an institution, and its code of ethics and duty to its users remains unchanged.”

Whilst neither CNET nor Gerstmann were willing to discuss exactly what happened, Gerstmann was keen to play down the implications of his firing by telling MTV’s Multiplayer blog that there’s no reason for gamers to doubt Gamespot’s reviews.

Despite that, public opinion in the gaming world swung against CNET, despite the hints that Gerstmann’s firing may be nothing to do with Kane & Lynch, and more to do disagreements with (new) senior manager Josh Larson. If I may quote liberally from Kotaku:

Speaking with a Gamespot employee yesterday who asked not to be named for this story, we’ve learned that, despite the neutral nature of the Gamespot news item on the matter, the editorial staff is said to be “devastated, gutted and demoralized” over the removal of former editorial director Jeff Gerstmann. While the termination of Gerstmann, a respected fixture at Gamespot, was pitched to his remaining colleagues by management as a “mutual decision”, it was anything but, we’re told.

The confusion over the reasons for Gerstmann’s termination, compounded with a lack of transparency from management has created a feeling of “irreconcilable despair” that may eventually lead to an exodus of Gamespot editorial staffers. “Our credibility,” said the source, “is in ruins.” Over the course of the previous days, a “large number of Gamespot editors” have expressed their intentions to leave. Tales of emotionally deflated peers, with no will to remain at the site, were numerous.

Unless cooler heads prevail or concerns are addressed, Gamespot could see “mass resignations”, our source revealed.

Rank and file employees of the Gamespot organization are unaware of the real reasons behind Gerstmann’s termination. Our source admitted that Eidos was less than pleased with the review scores for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, but the team has “dealt with plenty of unhappy publishers before.” Our contact stressed that “Money has never played a role in reviews before” and that “[Gamespot] has never altered a score.” No pressure from management or sales has been exercised to remove or alter content, the source reiterated.

However, the source did speculate that disagreements between Gertsmann and VP of games Josh Larson may have been the root cause of the former being terminated. Larson, successor to former editor in chief Greg Kasavin, was described as out of touch with the employees who report to him. The VP is the one allegedly responsible for telling Gamespot editorial staff that it was Gerstmann’s “tone” that was at the heart of his dismissal.

Then, on a Valleywag post disputing the theory that Gerstmann was fired for a bad review, someone who appears to be a Gamespot insider left a number of rather damning comments (again, summed up well by Kotaku):

No one wants to be named because no one wants to get fucking fired! This management team has shown what they’re willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building.

What you might not be aware of is that GS is well known for appealing mostly to hardcore gamers. The mucky-mucks have been doing a lot of “brand research” over the last year or so and indicating that they want to reach out to more casual gamers. Our last executive editor, Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson, who had no editorial experience and was only involved on the business side of things. Over the last year there has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process; we’ve started having to give our sales team heads-ups when a game is getting a low score, for instance, so that they can let the advertisers know that before a review goes up. Other publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game’s getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it’ll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.

I was in the meeting where Josh Larson was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were “multiple instances of tone” in the reviews that he hadn’t been happy about, but that wasn’t Jeff’s problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that “AAA” titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.

Gamespot insiders were clearly unhappy with what has happened.

Eventually, Gamespot management did address the issue, although they maintain they are legally unable to discuss why Gerstmann was fired, the categorically deny that it was because of pressure from Eidos.

Q: Was Jeff fired?
A: Jeff was terminated on November 28, 2007, following an internal review process by the managerial team to which he reported.

Q: Why was Jeff fired?
A: Legally, the exact reasons behind his dismissal cannot be revealed. However, they stemmed from issues unrelated to any publisher or advertiser; his departure was due purely for internal reasons.

[…]

Q: Was Eidos Interactive upset by the game’s review?
A: It has been confirmed that Eidos representatives expressed their displeasure to their appropriate contacts at GameSpot, but not to editorial directly. It was not the first time a publisher has voiced disappointment with a game review, and it won’t be the last. However, it is strict GameSpot policy never to let any such feelings result in a review score to be altered or a video review to be pulled.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment cause Jeff to be terminated?
A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment cause the alteration of the review text?
A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment lead to the video review being pulled down?
A: Absolutely not.

[…]

Q: Why didn’t GameSpot write about Jeff’s departure sooner?
A: Due to HR procedures and legal considerations, unauthorized CNET Networks and GameSpot employees are forbidden from commenting on the employment status of current and former employees. This practice has been in effect for years, and the CNET public-relations department stuck to that in the days following Jeff’s termination. However, the company is now making an exception due to the widespread misinformation that has spread since Jeff’s departure.

[…]

Q: GameSpot’s credibility has been called into question as a result of this incident. What is being done to repair and rebuild it?
A: This article is one of the first steps toward restoring users’ faith in GameSpot, and an internal review of the incident and controversy is under way. However, at no point in its history has GameSpot ever deviated from its review guidelines, which are publicly listed on the site. Great pains are taken to keep sales and editorial separated to prevent any impression of impropriety.

For years, GameSpot has been known for maintaining the highest ethical standards and having the most reliable and informative game reviews, previews, and news on the Web. The colleagues and friends that Jeff leaves behind here at GameSpot intend to keep it that way.

The problem is, the damage has been done. Whatever the reason for Gerstmann’s dismissal, the appalling way that CNET handled the crisis means that a lot of people now believe that the Chinese wall that separates advertising and editorial has been permanently damaged. That in and of itself means that both Gamespot’s and CNET’s credibility has been severely dented and if there’s one thing that a publisher cannot afford to do, it’s to appear even for a moment to be in the pockets of its advertisers. Readers want impartiality, honesty, transparency, and if they sniff a rat they’ll leave in droves.

CNET should never have fired Gerstmann without thoroughly thinking through the implications of such a precipitate dismissal. Doing so without a strategy in place for addressing the inevitable rumour that would follow was stupid and short-sighted. In any company, that sort of “marching off the premises” style of dismissal is bound to cause a rumpus, especially when the person being fired, as Gerstmann appears to have been, is much loved by their colleagues and readers, and has been there for so long. It shouldn’t have taken a genius to realise that there’d be a pretty strong reaction against it, and that some sort of thought should be given to how to address the rumours early on.

Whether Gerstmann was fired because of Larson, or Eidos, or something else, is almost irrelevant now. The conclusions one can draw are that either CNET’s in bed with its advertisers, or it’s being managed incompetently by someone prone to throwing hissy fits and firing people on the spot. If one were being generous, one might just put this down to an HR/PR fuck-up, but there is a valuable lesson to be learnt by every publisher and every company with externally-facing bloggers: Look before you fire.

11.27.07
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Reuters-Nokia Mobile Journalism Toolkit and mindset

Last night, Suw and I went to Reuters headquarters in Canary Wharf for an Online News Association event. Reuters was talking about its MJT – mobile journalism toolkit (they used to call it MoJo for mobile journalism but for some reason aren’t using the term any longer). Reuters partnered with Nokia to develop the toolkit after working with the handset maker on a mobile Flash-lite application to highlight their content on the N95. Nokia is trying to understand the needs of journalists in the field and how that might drive development of special applications for consumer-oriented mobile phones like the N95. Reuters is exploring what is possible with the current generation of phones (and networks) while doing some experimentation with what types of story-telling this might allow.

The basic toolkit includes:

  • a standard Nokia N95
  • a Nokia Bluetooth keyboard
  • a Sony digital mic with a bespoke adapter for the phone
  • a special tripod
  • a solar charger
  • a Power Monkey supplemental charger

They also have slightly modified the RSS output from the phone’s production app and WordPress’ RSS intake to allow for some additional RSS elements that Reuters needs in order to handle content correctly. Video is uploaded direct to their hosting service and text goes straight to the blog platform, and an editor is automatically alerted that content has been sent for review and publication. The material can then be published to various platforms.

The discussion was lead by Ilicco Elia, Mobile Product Manager Europe; alongside Mark Jones, Global Community Editor; Matt Cowan, European Technology, Media and Telecommunications Correspondent; and Nic Fulton, chief scientist for Reuters media. Ilicco gave an overview of how Reuters and Nokia decided to work together.

Nic said that they decided to work on multi-horizon strategy, looking at what they could do right now, what they could do in the near future and aspirational things they might want to do a lot further down the line. Right now, the N95 takes 5-megapixel stills, near DVD-quality video and works on 3.5G data and WiFi networks. But Ilicco is already looking to the future:

We see in five years, HD video, extremely powerful CPUs. You might say it’s a laptop, but it will still be a personal, mobile device.

They worked directly with Timo Koskinen, the project manager for Nokia’s research centre. Matt Cowan talked about his experience with the toolkit, showing video he shot of Vint Cerf at the Media Guardian’s Edinburgh TV festival. My colleague Jemima Kiss has an overview of the experiment and talked with Matt about the toolkit for the Guardian’s digital content blog.

Before joining Reuters, Matt worked for Canadian CTV covering California. There he did work shooting and editing his own pieces, so he had experience with multimedia reporting. Matt said that he fed back his experiences directly to Nokia. The phone is a bit difficult to hold steady, which isn’t surprising – it’s not like balancing a hefty traditional TV camera on your shoulder, which provides some stability.

I’ve experienced this same problem myself, first hand, doing a video journalism project for the BBC in 2003. I used a Sony PD150, a ‘pro-sumer’ digital video camera. Doing handheld work takes practice because the light camera is much easier to shake, despite built-in motion compensation.

Other downsides:

  • unreliability of 3G networks (Ilicco said they had spoken to Vodafone but didn’t seem very pleased with response)
  • battery life, although this improving
  • it takes six hours for the solar panel to recharge the phone
  • the brutal costs for data roaming charges

Matt talked later about this would allow journalists to develop relationships with the audience.

There were slightly predictable questions about quality. One of the journalists said “cutting quality is a fancy way of saying cutting corners”. One of the shots, an opportunity shot backstage at a New York fashion show was a bit jerky, and one person asked what the point of the video was.

What I really liked from the Reuters team was this spirit of experimentation. Matt said:

I don’t think that this will change everything overnight. It is an incredibly exciting tool. It will change how we report certain stories. … It’s not ‘I’m here in front of this building, and this happened 10 hours ago’. You have immediate interaction, an intimacy. You’re in the environment.

As Howard Owens recently said after widely circulated comments from Rob Curley about the difference between mindset and skillset, having the right skills doesn’t mean that someone is open to innovation and entrepreneurial ideas. Owens calls it the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

The fixed mindset might say something like, “I got into this business to be a writer, not a videographer.” The growth mindset might say, “Video? Cool! Let me give it a try.”

And I think he puts the ‘quality’ debate in perspective:

You don’t make “quality” a religion and refuse to try new forms of reporting because it doesn’t immediately meet your quality standards. You are willing to try and fail, and keep trying until you get it right, and you don’t resent others doing the same.

There were some comments about how we would see “Bloggers doing this in a year’s time”, but as Suw said last night, bloggers have been doing this for years. I often say that keeping an eye on bloggers and other grassroots media is a good way to find inspiration for new ways to get the story. I still remember at the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles seeing an IndyMedia reporter  backing up as mounted police moved towards him. He has carrying a PowerBook with a webcam and an early wireless modem strapped on it, sending live video from the streets to the net.

But one thing that was refreshing was to hear Reuters talk about community and bloggers in such a positive way. Mark talked about Reuters’ community strategy:

My role as community editor to create a bit of identity around editorial talent and be more open to the audience. We also want to be open to the web including the the blogosphere and build networks around our journalistic expertise.

Reuters have their own blogs and their YouWitness user-submitted photo and story effort. They have invested in Pluck and its Blogburst aggregator service. They also partner with multi-lingual blog community Global Voices, including on their Reuters Africa project, and they have a carbon trading community.

And Matt said that he saw advances in mobile technology as an even bigger boon to bloggers. He knows the founder of eco-community TreeHugger who used to have to trek to internet cafes to feed his site but now can do it almost anywhere. Bloggers can “build a brand with their own thoughts.”

In 1999, I covered Hurricane Floyd as it made landfall in North Carolina for the BBC News website. I filed throughout the night, but after the storm passed, it knocked out electricity and phone lines throughout the eastern third of the state. I wasn’t able to file a number of pictures I had taken because I simply had no way to get them back to the back to base. Within months after the storm, I had a data cable for my mobile phone. As the mobile technology got better, I could do more in the field. In 2006, on a trip for the BBC’s World Have Your Say, I was able to use a 3G data card in the US to set up a mobile WiFi hotspot and keep us connected when standard communications channels failed.

Mobile technology lets journalists stay closer to the story and connected not only to our office but also to our audience. The news organisations that experiment now will be best placed to take advantage of the journalistic possibilities that ever-advancing mobile technology allows.

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11.18.07
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The battle isn’t against technology but for relevance

This post has already been written once by Steve Yelvington, but after our recent Web 2.0 and journalism discussion, I thought the subject was worth revisiting.

In writing this, I’m not trivialising the economic anxiety that newspaper journalists are experiencing right now. I remember Dan Gillmor telling attendees at a Global Voices meeting in London in 2005 that, while some journalists were defensive about blogs and ‘citizen journalism’, people needed to understand that some of this grew out of the economic uncertainties and job insecurity journalists were facing. (Dan, I hope that’s a fair parahprase.) But I think it’s important to understand the nature of the problem.

Journalism and new media professor Mark Deuze left two lengthy comments on our Web 2.0 and journalism post painting a very grim picture of the journalism job market and challenging some of our optimism about digital journalism. In some ways, I’m sure that we’re coming from similar positions with a different emphasis, but I wanted to respond to some of the points he made because I think they’re important.

‘A long slide toward irrelevancy’

I think Mark conflated several issues. Suw and I outlined the journalistic opportunities that Web 2.0 provides, while he focused on economic pressures on journalists and recent journalism grads looking for work. As we said in our previous comment, newspaper journalists in developed countries (it needs to be said that newspaper readership is increasing in developing countries) should not blame the internet alone for what has been an ongoing trend in circulation declines.

The decline began in the 1970s, as Steve Yelvington pointed out, and this is part of a more pressing issue that journalists are ignoring, but which Merrill Brown pointed out in his 2005 study, Abandoning the News:

In short, the future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news.

Through Internet portal sites, handheld devices, blogs and instant messaging, we are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic function of the news business and raise fundamental questions about the future of the news field.

Merrill found that young people aren’t engaging with the news when they have children and buy a house as they have in the past, despite the old adage that ‘youngsters’ would ‘grow into it’. They get more news from the Daily Show than from the nightly news or the daily paper.

Steve called it “… a long, slow slide toward irrelevancy through the loss of readership driven by generational change. … Even if the Internet had never happened, newspapers — especially big-city papers — have long been headed for a dangerous inflection point at which their market penetration would not be sufficient to sustain a mass-media business model.”

As Steve wrote in another post:

The core problem faced by newspapers is a loss of readers across the board. The General Social Survey has documented a decline in newspaper readership that’s pretty much a straight line going back to around 1970. It’s a problem of content relevancy in an increasingly rich media mix, and not specific to the emergence of the World Wide Web.

Employment trends

To quote Mark again: “Then you state: ‘Certainly, saying that journalism students will never get a full time or permanent job is an exaggeration.’ No, it is not an exaggeration, I’m afraid.” But he is both exaggerating and selectively quoting statistics to try and support his point of view.

I looked at some of the studies that Mark quoted, such as the Annual Surveys of Journalism and Mass Communication Graduate, which contradicts his presentation of a straight line decline (at least in the US) of journalism head count since 1992. As the surveys point out, the job market for graduates was the most favourable in 2000 before dropping off over the last seven years. But this was the summary of the most recent report, 2006, which discusses the job market in 2005:

  • Only 3.1% of the journalism and mass communication graduates in 2006 had no job interviews as they entered the market.
  • The percentage of 2006 journalism and mass communication bachelor’s degree recipients with at least one job offer on graduation was 76.2, comparable to the figure of a year earlier.
  • On October 31, 2006, 63.7% of the journalism and mass communication bachelor’s degree recipients from the past spring held a full-time job, and 11.9% had a part-time job. These figures are statistically comparable with the figures from a year earlier.

Now, I’m sure that the pay is horrible and the hours are punishing, but entry level journalism pay and hours have always been brutal. My first job at a newspaper in Kansas paid $2000 a year less than a first year teacher in the town where I worked. I most certainly worked between 41 and 50 hours, which the study said a quarter of grads did. (Having said that, during presidential election years working the BBC, there were times when I worked between 60 and 70 hours.) I was told at the time by more senior journalists in the industry that cub reporters always got paid peanuts. This is not a justification. I wish it wasn’t so, then and now. It’s difficult to attract talented, smart people when the pay and conditions can be so appalling.

I would say to journalism students that they need look to the future and not the past. There are many stories of new print grads actually being more conservative and less digitally savvy than newsroom veterans. I’ve said it before. Print journalism students need new heroes. Leveraging my digital skills for higher than average pay was one of the few strategies that seems to have worked in my career to earn a living wage.

Technology is not depopulating journalism

Mark said: “So yes, companies investing in technology play catch-up, but this at the same time depopulates the field of journalism.”

This a specious argument that basically draws a direct relationship between technology outlays by newspapers and job cuts. It is not as if newspapers are spending on work-saving technology just so that they can sack journalists. This is an argument from an industrial context, where assembly line robots have replaced human beings, but there isn’t that sort of one-to-one relationship between technology and work force in news organisations. Some organisations are outsourcing reporting, but the depopulation of newspaper newsrooms is more directly related to circulation and ad revenue declines. See the post by Steve Yelvington that I’ve linked to above for a number of reasons why ad spend has decreased, including loss of local department store advertising to be replaced by lower ad rate blow-ins, not to mention the impact that Craigslist has had on classified ad revenues in some markets.

Also, new roles and jobs are being created because of computers and the internet, such as ‘news technologist‘ roles and database-driven reporting and presentation. CAR (computer-assisted reporting) has grown essential in investigative journalism, and now, news organisations are finding innovative ways to present data and information directly to their readers. These ‘techni-torial’ jobs will increase as we need technically savvy journalists to report, produce and present news in ways that digitally savvy audiences want.

And as we said in our previous post, user-generated content is being used to supplement, not replace, the work of traditional journalists. Enlightened news organisations are using user-generated content in many forms to add to their reporting and, in local UGC plays, reconnect with their communities.

Digital Divide: The Wills and the Won’ts

As for Mark’s comments about the digital divide, without explaining what he means by the ‘digital divide’, it’s an almost meaningless term. It used to describe socio-economic disparities in access to the internet and other digital technology. But does Mark mean regular access to the internet? Does he mean use of a mobile phone? A recent Harris poll showed that 80% of Americans were finding some way to get online.

This study also found that the online population is beginning to mirror the general population, e.g. 13% of the online population was Hispanic, which is the same percentages of Hispanics in the general US population, so this is not necessarily differential rates of access based on income or race. Access to technology is increasingly more affordable. WalMart introduced a $200 Linux-based computer two weeks ago that has sold out of its initial production run of about 10,000.

If Mark is talking about access to internet in the US or Europe and comparing it internet access rates in the developing world, those figures aren’t relevant to this argument. But I’m not sure what he means or which study that he’s quoting. I tend to agree with digital education expert Ewan McIntosh, who said recently at a conference here in the UK, the digital divide isn’t so much about the haves versus the have-nots but the wills versus the won’ts.

People are turning to the internet for news

As for the assertion that people aren’t getting their news online. What’s the source for that? What formats do they find confusing? I’m genuinely curious, not simply challenging Mark. I know that some Guardian readers are confused by what a blog is, but that could just as easily be attributed to the journalists’ general unawareness and misuse of the term – often in the process of rubbishing blogs while ironically showing how ignorant they are of the subject.

In Europe, 62% of the online population is turning to online media versus traditional media. Granted, this is a sample of a sample, but it’s still showing a trend towards digital – especially if you consider digital mobile and not just via fixed internet access.

The New York Times said it recently when reviewing circulation figures: “More Readers Trading Newspapers for Web Sites.” Duncan Reily at TechCrunch put it this way:

The problem with newspapers isn’t the web alone, its excessive choice in a declining market. Newsprint has a future, but not in a cut throat marketplace that provides more choice than the market can consume.

New, hybrid models of journalism

Beyond that, I’d like to challenge the view that there is a binary opposition of print versus online. Look to MyMissourian and Bluffton Today to see what a hybrid online-to-print model can achieve. Clyde Bentley, news veteran and professor at the University of Missouri, said that print serves the masses but online services ‘the actives’. With MyMissourian, he’s not making people choose between print and online, but serving both constituencies.

And more from Steve Yelvington. In Bluffton, parent company Morris wasn’t just trying to undercut a paid competitor with a free-sheet: Their goal was to increase the social capital in their community. The result of this is that they don’t miss stories because their readers tip them off. The website and the paper add to community cohesion.

But running through Mark’s entire argument is a focus on headcount, jobs and pay without talking about the economic pressure on newspapers. Newspapers aren’t making the same money that they used to, particularly in the US, now that the monopolies that single titles had over specific geographic areas have been eroded. Something’s gotta give. Yes, it does mean job cuts, lower pay rises and some loss of benefits, but this isn’t simply about maintaining double digit profits or returning value to stockholders over maintaining staff numbers and benefits either. This is about the fundamental erosion of the business models that many newspapers are based on.

Journalists can be part of the solution

Mark also says: “I am pro-Web 2.0, excited about participatory media culture, and agree that journalism as a whole can benefit from all that this has to offer. But you can only expect reporters and editors to do so if they are supported in meaningful ways, if they are included in managerial strategies,”

I may not have surveyed hundreds of journalists as Mark has. I can only speak from my own experience, but many, if not most, journalists I know are resistant to change. They don’t want to be involved in managerial strategies and view change with scepticism, often bred from professionally cultivated cynicism.

I agree with Mark about support, and I try to offer as much support to my fellow journalists as possible, helping them to take advantage of the journalistic possibilities provided by these new technologies. However, I pick my battles. I don’t have time to convert the obstructionist sceptics in the industry. They are still spouting the same lines they did when I started working online 10 years ago, and I don’t see that changing or me changing them. Fortunately, I have colleagues who are curious and want to move forward.

Mark said, “if [reporters and editors] are empowered to innovate from the bottom-up – rather than being told to either adapt to the brand new 3-million dollar Content Management System or get out.”

You know, again, this is a nice line, but it doesn’t sync with working reality at The Guardian, the BBC – to name two news organisations that I have worked for – or other news organisations that I know of. Yes, we’re building a new CMS at the Guardian, but for a lot of shops, they are using open-source tools. Morris Digital uses Drupal. Reuters, the New York Times and CNN use WordPress, which is both free and open source, not a $3m content management system. WordPress and many of these open-source CMSes are far simpler than most newspaper CMSes I’ve used. And the job cuts simply aren’t decided by whether the journalist will get up to speed with a new CMS.

As a matter of fact, the cost of innovation is decreasing, especially for those news organisations smart enough to use any number of open source solutions available. That’s the real opportunity, but a missed opportunity for many outlets. They can reduce the cost of innovation and therefore experment more with less risk. Of course, innovation doesn’t mean focusing on the business at the cost of journalistic quality, but that’s a post for another day.

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11.15.07
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Radio Lab Master Class

Kevin Marks turned Suw and me onto the excellent WNYC programme/podcast Radio Lab. The programme deals with scientific, bordering on, philosophical issues such as Time, Morality or the biggest of big questions: Who am I? Or more precisely asking, “How does the brain make me?”

In this episode, actually an extra while they work on season 4, they talk about the craft of making the soundscapes that they create for the show. They begin by playing a clip from the Musical Language show of developmental psychologist Anne Fernald talking about how mothers talk to their babies. She said, “Sound is like touch at a distance.” Listen to them play with the sound. For journalists not working with sound, this is an inspirational master class. Listen and learn.

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10.31.07
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It’s Halloween, and the NUJ are coming as trolls

NUJ recruitment posterThere should be a footnote to this National Union of Journalists recruitment poster. Join the union unless you are one of those

“self-serving bloggers who don’t really want to be in a union ‘cos it doesn’t have that ‘I’m a digital revolutionary and I’m out there, doing it’ vibe”

This is a line from Gary Herman on NUJ New Media Industrial Council site. I’d leave a comment, but alas, there are none. Have they ever heard the old adage, when you’re in a hole stop digging? Hey guys, if you want to create an ‘us versus them’ line in the sand, congratulations, you’ve succeeded. And the ‘them’ isn’t The Man in management. There is obviously no room in your union for a “brain dead digital enthusiast” like me. (Just to be fair, lest I’m accused of taking the quote out of context. The full sentence is: “Redundancies at AoL should give the most brain dead digital enthusiast pause for thought.”) And right before that, Herman takes a most unprofessional jab at Roy Greenslade:

At the very best, people like Roy Greenslade who huff and puff and storm out of the union are behaving precipitately. At worst, they’re trying to put the boot in. Probably, they’re just a bit dim.

I’m not anti-union. But how am I supposed to interpret such statements? It doesn’t fill me with the warm feelings of union solidarity. “Sorry, but you’re a bit dim comrade?” Is that the message you really wish to convey? Herman rails away against PR and blogs in his piece, but I’m going to give a piece of advice that I never thought I’d suggest to anyone: The NUJ really needs to work on its PR in terms of courting new media journalists.

Emotive and irresponsible attacks such as those in Herman’s piece have muddled the NUJ’s core argument of maintaining journalistic quality and integrity under challenges not from the internet but from economic pressures of changing business models. We all agree that journalists should be ethical, our journalism of the highest possible quality and that our journalism should serve the public good. I have forgone lucrative opportunities in for-profit journalism and consulting because I believe in the mission of public service journalism and its place in a democratic society. We agree that journalists should be compensated for their work. We are not in disagreement over these points, and I – as a digital enthusiast – am not the enemy.

As for the NUJ, I’m moving on. Jeff Jarvis is right:

It’s a mistake, I think, to let the curmudgeons set the agenda and, for that matter, get the attention. It doesn’t move us forward.

I’ve got plenty of colleagues and collaborators to work with to create the future of journalism. I’m part of the new collective and have been for a long time. Online journalist since 1996 and damn proud of it.

10.29.07
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Let’s have a real debate about Web 2.0

Both of us feel so strongly about the National Union of Journalists’ recent statements about Web 2.0 and new media that we felt we had to challenge them. Although we’re breaking the ‘don’t feed the trolls’ rule, we felt these issues are too important to the future of journalism to be left unexamined.

In this post, we want to challenge Donnacha DeLong’s piece WEB 2.0 IS RUBBISH in the Journalist, the union’s magazine. The article is a one-sided polemic which not only mischaracterises Web 2.0 but also misrepresents the way that journalists and editors think about collaborating with their readers.

The article begins with the subhead: “Webfolk call the burgeoning interactive use of the internet ‘Web 2.0’.” “Webfolk”? That’s as dismissive and belittling as “boffins” or “nerds”, but at least it sets one’s expectations pretty accurately for the rest of the article. Whilst DeLong mentions in passing the fact that the web is “full of opportunities”, he chooses to focus only on what he sees as the “dangers”. This is unsurprising. Between us, we’ve come across this The peril! The peril!” attitude from many and various sources, online and in person, but it’s not a constructive attitude for the NUJ – or DeLong as its representative – to take.

DeLong’s first error is to oversimplistically equate Web 2.0 with “participation and feedback from our ‘users’.” As the Telegreph’s Shane Richmond says in the comments on a Jeff Jarvis post, this is no more than a convenient strawman to attack. As we have long argued here at Strange Attractor, Web 2.0 is far more than asking people “tell us what you reckon“. Rather, it creates an opportunity for journalists to find not just eyewitnesses, but also expertise from what Jay Rosen calls “the people formerly known as the audience”. Any journalist worth his or her salt should be interested in talking to people that witnessed or who can shed real light on news events, and should be willing to go beyond the limits of their own address book – Web 2.0 enables that in a way we’ve never seen before.

Web 2.0 is also about mass collaboration, such as sifting through documents or carrying out research. After another Church of Journalism troll wrote a poorly researched and argued piece in the Los Angeles Times recently, Jay Rosen wrote a piece about the journalism that bloggers actually do. This is about networked investigation and research, not just soliciting feedback and opinion. In the UK, Ben Goldacre who writes the blog Bad Science and a column in The Guardian of the same name, asked his readers to file FOIA requests with Durham Council to get information about fish oil “trials”.

Then there are the database-driven online projects that these new technologies enable. Take a look at the Washington Post’s election coverage. You can see all of the candidates campaign appearances in a Google Maps mashup and even download their calendar. Both are great resources not only for the public but also internally for the Post’s own journalists.

And, of course, the journalistic benefits of Web 2.0 are not just about reader-facing stuff. Tools such as RSS, Google Alerts and social bookmarking help journalists efficiently gather and organise lots of sources of information when doing research. We often hear about how as a society we are overloaded with information, but these tools provide a way to sift through a mass of data to find what we need. Any journalist not using RSS and social bookmarking on a day-to-day basis is making life unnecessarily hard for themselves.

Having thus mischaracterised Web 2.0, DeLong then goes on to claim that it is “seen as replacing traditional media.” By who, exactly? Now, a good blogger would give examples, but we’re expected to take DeLong’s word for it. Obviously it’s difficult to include links in a magazine article, which DeLong’s piece originally was, but there is no reason not to provide sources on his blog post. The irony, of course, is that this is the exact sort of cut-and-paste from print to web behaviour that the NUJ complains about in its report on mulitmedia working. (Note: We haven’t seen the original report yet, so we will comment fully on that later, when we have.)

But neither of us can think of any traditional news organisation with a strategy – stated or otherwise – of replacing all their journalists with content sourced from the internet and/or their readers. And the discussion about the dissolution of the mainstream media in favour of 100% citizen journalism was had in (and outside, but mainly in) the blogosphere at least three years ago.

Then DeLong digs up the old chestnut that journalists alone can produce “truly authoritative content”, a claim that is patently untrue. Suffice it to say that long before we were even talking about Web 2.0, Dan Gillmor understood that his readers in Silicon Valley had expert knowledge that he could tap into to make his journalism better. There are thousands of experts out there – lawyers, professors, professionals – who are writing about their field in an accessible and interesting manner.

DeLong then says:

They have the ability to produce content that informs and fulfil an essential part of democracy – the widespread dissemination of information that allows the public to question those in charge.

This is over-egging the pudding somewhat. The good journalist does this, but many who should, don’t. We too often see press releases and wire copy republished with nary a challenge to the party line. Sometimes it’s only the dogged persistence of activists and experts – some of whom are bloggers, many of whom are not – who fact check, challenge and publicise inaccuracies that results in a more accurate story being told.

And the training that DeLong puts such stock in is rather a red herring too. Many excellent journalists come from non-journalism backgrounds, but bring expertise in specialist areas such as science, business, technology and the arts, to name a few. And many poor journalists went to J-school. Setting up journalists, collectively, as some sort of bastion of democracy and truth is rather an exaggeration.

Journalists aren’t the only people who can contribute to democracy. Where would journalists have been without pictures from “witness contributors” – to use the NUJ’s phrase – when covering the recent crackdown in Burma?

Much of this unnecessary angst about the threat of citizen journalism and Web 2.0 – and the deification of journalists that accompanies it – comes from the misperception that everyone wants to be a journalist. Only a tiny percentage of bloggers have any desire to go into journalism, and they would have made moves to enter their chosen profession with or without Web 2.0. But the vast majority of people who provide eyewitness reports of an event are there only through luck (good or bad), and expert bloggers are expert because they have years of experience behind them. Neither groups has any interest in changing careers.

DeLong goes on:

The media are not perfect. More often than not, they focus on issues the public is interested in rather than those that are truly in the public interest. But those who argue that Web 2.0 is the future want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The imperfections and exemplars of the media are entirely irrelevant to whether or not Web 2.0 has a part to play in the media’s future. More importantly, the media has to realise that it has no choice: It must embrace the internet, including Web 2.0, because the audience is already there and advertisers are moving there quickly.

The mainstream media is not leading the charge to the internet, it is following along behind its audience, laggardly, sullenly and defensively. Many journalists have spent ten years dismissing the internet as a fad and an inferior medium. They are equally dismissive of Web 2.0 without even knowing what it means. DeLong says on the NUJ New Media’s blog, “So there we go – a nice big debate about the issues”, but he has done nothing to move the debate forward and nothing to help of inform NUJ members. Instead, he has engaged in more scare-mongering about the threat of the internet and simplistically focused on perceived, but illusory, dangers to journalism.

Both of us embraced the internet because of the opportunities it presents. It’s the world’s greatest story-telling medium, bringing together the strengths of text, audio, video and interaction. The internet as a communications tool can help journalists tap sources like never before, making their stories richer and more balanced. Why wouldn’t journalists take advantage of the internet?

Yes, the job is changing, and we as journalists need to change with it. The internet may be posing a threat to the business model that support journalism, and it’s understandable that this causes anxiety. But misrepresenting the reality of that change won’t make it go away.