May 11, 2006

The Future Journalist

When I went to lunch with the editor of a media magazine recently, we talked about the evolution of her magazine to the web and I remember how she was adamant that there was no way she was going to make her journalists have to publish directly to their website (when they build one). Ever. That was beneath the skill of a journalist.

It was at that point I realized that this editor would never consider me a journalist. I wrote and published more times in a week than she did in a month and I had a bigger audience. But for her, a journalist sure wasn’t a blogger. Journalists were thoroughbred horses, and I was just an old nag that had found its way onto the course.

It’s not that I strive to be a journalist. Nor do any of the contributors, I think. It’s just that the more we publish on PSFK, the more we understand how the old press do it / did it. And it doesn’t seem to be very different from what we do in theory. We know they think they do this great service to mankind but from what we can see they gather content, investigate new content a little and sprinkle with opinion and interviews. OK, we’re no magazine with a ‘trained’ staff on the masthead of 40, but we do kinda the same thing.

Oh actually, we do something different: we get you lot involved in many different ways - from submissions, to comments, to ideas to design.

Anyway, I bring this up because Jeff Jarvis pulls out some quotes from an interview with Gruner + Jahr boss Bernd Kundrun, where Bernd suggests that in future journalists will work much like bloggers:

“The journalistic skill in the future wil be the moderation of ‘user-generated content,’ exactly like earlier information and data bases in the internet…I believe that journalism must find a new definition. But we are standing just at the beginning. I can’t conclusively describe the job description of journalists today”

Notice that word? “Moderation”!

Check the other extracts from the interview over at JJ’s site plus links to other “visionary statements from European media bosses”.

BuzzMachine » The vision from Europe

Article categories: Media & Publishing, Web & Technology