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”.
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“Journalists were thoroughbred horses, and I was just an old nag that had found its way onto the course.”
- love it how you said it and you are so right. That is the general impression, but then again with all that’s been happeing recently (ellegirl moving operations online, condenast launching a teen site.. etc) it is probably in the best interest of these editors to accept bloggers are more than mere .. old nags.
May 12th, 2006 at 11:36 am
Lots of points raised here. For some publications, it makes perfect sense to keep print and online journalism separate, not for snobbish reasons but because the online brand is complementary but not mere repeats. See Conde Nast’s online strategy, where vogue.com and glamour.com have distiinct editorial teams because that’s what they merit. However, when publications feel that online is ‘beneath’ their print journos (cf the Tony O’Reilly’s stated online strategy for the Independent compared to that of the Guardian) then they’re missing the point. Not all mainstream media think this way by any means.
The distinction between journalists and bloggers isn’t about the skill or methods of a blogger – it’s about being commissioned. It’s about having one editor overseeing, including content in a wider context, it’s about editing and third-party fact checking. Or it’s about first-person opinion, commenting, linking, as you say above.
Bloggers can be journalists and vice versa. But the medium of blogging is distinct from journalism, for better or worse. Blogs are not the death of journalism – they’re complementary, and can only help journalism to get better.
May 15th, 2006 at 5:28 am
“There are passengers for every train” – this saying can be applied here, too – there is room for journalism as it is known up to now and there is a necessity for blogging. They complement each other. And there is no reason why the same person cannot be both – a professional journalist and a blogger.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:16 am