A new media sermon from blogger Jeff Jarvis
When you pay £6,000 for a journalism course you’re somewhat inclined to think of journalism as a complex profession. I’ve* stumped up £6,000 to do the Newspaper Journalism postgraduate diploma at City University and therefore tend to think along these lines.
Up to a point. ‘The citizen journalists are coming’ say bloggers and online media lecturers – there are a growing number of examples of citizen journalists breaking stories. Look at Mayhill Fowler’s story about Barack Obama’s un-PC comments on the campaign trail for Huffington Post. See the twitter users who reported the 2008 Los Angeles earthquake first, or posted dramatic pictures of the ‘Miracle on the Hudson River’.
In times gone by newspapers only needed to compete with the newsgathering prowess of their rivals. Increasingly they are now having to compete with the newsgathering potential of the public.
As the number of voices increases, this changes the role of the professional journalist. Journalists now have a responsibility to bring cohesion, context and accuracy to news from the social web. This means introducing new content models for journalism which collaborate with the public rather than simply dictating to them.
Professional journalists cannot afford to dismiss the newsgathering potential of the public. It is not enough to just acknowledge that the tools are out there for people to create entertaining or informative content. Journalists must acknowledge that these tools are being used to a high standard.
Nobody puts this better than Jeff Jarvis in his post ‘The myth of the creative class’.
More from Jeff Jarvis -
* my grandparents
Photo by Eirik Solheim.
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