MediaVidea

Leave Journalism alone

Responding to Kevin Farnham's idea that 'Blogs are a medium for journalism; twitter, MySpace comments, etc., are not journalism’, Fred Wilson argues that 'I think journalism itself is a dated concept. We are now in the world of conversation. We are talking to ourselves.'

I suppose we are getting too much caught up with semantics and labels, from Web 2.0 and two-way conversation to News 2.0 and User communities, going around in circles, ever trying to do a Tim O'Reilly and put our own spin to the bewildering pace of change.

To most journalists, bloggers are not journalists.
Bloggers rarely go out, ferret out new stuff, rather, we dig new stuff from our RSS readers, or talk to people, check and counter check facts.

This is a very important aspect of the news reporting job, which is not going to change much in future.

Students at the Virginia Tech might talk up the incident in Facebook forums, and bloggers opine about it, but someone still has to go there, sniff around and… you know the drill.

Kent puts it right when he says that blogs and Twitter are plain tools.

We must not make the medium the message.

The last time something changed journalism was when Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson had a hearty stab at it, and later by the likes of Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Hunter's Gonzo ethos is thriving well among the good bloggers,

That said, we are bloggers.
Talk is talk and journalism is journalism.

As it is, journalists have enough on mind.
In the words of Pink Floyd, Leave the kid alone.

Labels: journalism, news 2.0

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:24 PM