Lessons For Newspapers. Read Up.
April 1st, 2008 | by Brad King |The wonderful folks at Ars get a double-dip today. My friend Chris forwarded me this response to Eric Alterman’s piece in the New Yorker (which I discussed earlier.)
The response comes in reference to Alterman’s view that while social media allows for greater communication, first-rate journalism is — or will — suffer for it as the business of media gets tougher.
Arts, of course, has a different response, one that falls in line with what I — and an increasing chorus of voices — have been saying for sometime.
Namely that journalism and technology don’t eat each other. But technology will eat journalism if editors and reporters don’t open their minds to the possibilities of technology.
The idea that journalism will someone go away in a socially-mediated world is ridiculous by almost any rational standard.
The brilliance of social media is that — when done correctly — actually increases the knowledge base of the individual reporter and the industry as a whole.
Now, that requires quite a bit of time and effort on both the part of the journalist and the part of the technologist. Each has to understand the goal — and the process — for work. This isn’t easy. Both require a certain specific sophistication.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Even at my university, there are a series of discussions about what types of technology courses should be added to individual curriculum. How much is too much technology? How little is too little?
The answer is unknowable, really, because that assumes one-size-fits-all, which if we know anything about technology, is a disaster.
The point, though, is that technology enables reporters to do what they’ve never been able to do before. It extends the reach of the individual out to the masses. Not in one-to-many, but many-to-many. It’s Read/Write.
