That’s a distinct possibility for me after chairing a discussion on communities and journalism at the World Editors Forum in Cape Town on Tuesday.
I use blogs and social networking sites like Facebook - but I’m 47 so I’m hardly the future.
The point of the session was to get people thinking about what really lies ahead for journalism in the generation after me - and after that.
It is going to be a new world with much more interacting, communing and socializing between journalists and our audience.
Richard Sambrook, director of Global News at the BBC (and one of my Facebook ‘friends’) is convinced that social media will be central to news organisations in the future.
In particular, in a world of commoditised news, journalists will need to be able to host conversations with their audiences while also playing their traditional roles of newsgathering and providing context and analysis.
Richards most excited about networked journalism the notion that you need to connect with your audience because within it are people who know more about any subject you might cover than your journalists. This holds the promise of driving up standards in journalism.
Rebecca Mackinnon, co-founder of Global Voices an aggregator of blogs from the developing world that is partly sponsored by Reuters thinks that journalists will need to learn how to listen to the public via blogs.
If you spend time in the Egyptian blogosphere reading Egyptian blogs its a bit like spending time in the cafes and living rooms of Cairo finding out what people care about.
Rebecca’s convinced that journalists will find new subjects to cover if they do this.
One glimpse of the future I got was from Didier Pillet, Director of Information at Ouest-France, who believes bloggers are already moving into the heart of news coverage. He speaks for a daily with a circulation of 800,000 that gets something like half its material from so-called village reporters — local bloggers. Reassuringly, he told us that they are not envisaged as substitutes for news journalists.
On a similar theme, Dave Panos, CEO of Pluck (in which Reuters has a stake) pointed out several examples of how U.S. newspaper sites are beginning to find ways of covering new subject areas without using journalists by syndicating content from bloggers.
Let me know your thoughts about how journalists might have to change in this new age of social media. And if you’d like to see an edited video of the session, including a presentation on SecondLife by our very own Adam Pasick, then have a look at the bizcommunity blog.
David Schlesinger is Reuters Editor-in-Chief
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4 comments so far
Internet penetration in Egypt was 7% in 2005, up from 0.7% in 2000. So how representative of Egyptian public sentiment generally are the Egyptian bloggerati? How many of the two million cemetery-dwellers of Cairo blog, for example?
I live in Brazil and read GVO’s coverage of the bloggerati there, and often find myself asking the same question. Often, the bloggers cited are actually columnists from local commercial press sources. In the most recent post, the coverage tracks blog reaction to the launch of a biography of a Globo pop star by a publishing house with business ties to Globo. I don’t find this particularly enlightening.
Thank you, at any rate, for (properly) disclosing that Reuters partially funds Global Voices Online. Are there other business relationships among the panel members that we ought to know about? Or are these endorsements meant to be read as independent product reviews? And have you read the report of the independent commission on BBC business jouornalism and “impartiality”?
I’m an Orkut man myself — if you wanted to cover Brazilians online, for example, you would be better off setting up a Reuters bureua there rather than on the Ilha Brazil in Second Life.
Nut then I am 45, and live in Brazil, so I guess am not the future, either!
- Posted by ColinThe Cairo example does not give a cross section of Egypt. You’re seeing what the technically-inclined population of Egypt worries about, not the other 10 million who don’t have access to a computer. Yes, their worries are quite different.
- Posted by What is a blog?I have to agree with the commenter above. Quite right he/she is. A lot of journalists — myself included — get a little carried away by the blogging scene. It’s easy to forget that really, blogs are such a teeny-tiny media source representing a teeny-tiny population of the world.
- Posted by Dave Lee@ comment number 2 and 3,
Blog right now do represent a small fraction of the population, but that is till now. If you look at the recent years, the number of blogs have dramatically increased.
Some things just start out small. Youtube started out pretty small and look where it is today. It’s like the word Google. Why don’t you google this? Why don’t you youtube this video.
Additionally, you have to see the increasing relationship between people and journalists as such. A 100 years ago, the only way journalists could talk to the people as such was through newspapers. Then the Telivision came making the relationship even closer. Now the internet is here bringing us even closer. If you think about it, a hundred years ago, would I be talking to David Schlesinger is Reuters Editor-in-Chief or on his blog?
- Posted by The King