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Leave the newsroom. And network!
Is collaboration between professional and unprofessional writers possible? It has to be, if we don’t want the death of journalism. The task of the journalist is to moderate the storm of opinions, facilitate the process of media making. Zsuzsa Szabó has followed the panel discussion “Networked Journalism”.
“Our social role is to save the professional journalism”, said Charlie Beckett, director of the POLIS institute in London and author of Supermedia. “Our task is recasting, fixing the editorial values, being a service industry, and being facilitator. People like it! They create the social network. Leave the newsrooms and conclude a new contract with the citizens. Go to the readers! Being networked is more than being online. Journalism has to join to the social platforms like Facebook”, she claimed.
# It's about moderating!
Marco Pratellesi editor of the online edition of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, compared the development of media with the development of medical services. Thirty years ago one went to the doctor, got a recipe, and might become healthy again. Now the patient wants something, he is informed already, and asks the doctor to write a recipe. Nowadays the reader tells what he wants to be published and read about. “So we have to behave as a professional doctor, and direct the news mass somehow”, Marco Pratellesi said, but also maid an exception: “The reader can not be allowed to form our ideas totally!”
# Old media, new wave
No one can believe that simple websites attract the readers. Eric Ulken is sure about this. He used to be an editor on interactive technology of the American daily The Los Angeles Times. Now he is traveling across the planet, blogging about these themes. He described, that the LA Times can not be an international newspaper. It has to turn back to local news. “Do something unique”, he urged. The web is the first place to publish your news, and you have to do it immediately. Eric Ulken asked: “Can we say what the most important news is? We need to check what our readers are most interested in, that is measurable. And in the end we decide whether or whether not we accept the will of the public.”
# Back to the past - in the future
According to Paolo Liguori, editor of www.tgcom.mediaset.it, in 10 years the audience will be glutted by the huge online news jungle and wants to turn back to reading just one product considered as accurate and trustable. “We will go back to the basics of the journalism of the 1970s. Instead of the big waste – comments, non-serious blogs, personal posts – journalism create content that has a value”, Paolo Luguori pointed out.
# The new generation’s recipe
# Everybody can be a publisher.
# Establish a closer contact to your readers, and do not be afraid of arguing mails you will get.
# Leave the newsroom, and go to the street. Talk to people, look at the real world. This is journalism.
Posted in | 04.04.09
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