Where are we headed?
Three years ago, when I decided if I was going to get an undergraduate degree in anything, it might as well be journalism, I had no idea the profession was about to undergo major changes. Everything changed within days of my setting foot at the J-school: September 11th. Then Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, the war in Iraq, and now Rathergate (as it’s come to be known, unfortunately).
When I started something called “New Media Journalism†was the buzzword, and it was always something that intrigued me. So when people asked me what I wanted to do, I’d say some combination of the Internet and journalism. But I distinctly remember having no clear idea what that meant.
Three years ago, New Media meant a newspaper with a Web site. It meant attempting to do something with streaming video. And it meant giving newspaper reporters digital video cameras and recorders. In essence, I thought New Media Journalism would mean figuring out ways for the traditional media to adopt all the new technologies that were becoming more and more commonplace.
That, it turns out, was only part of the equation, and the lesser part, at that.
The change in journalism has been much more profound than a simple adoption of new technologies. Instead, we have seen (and will continue to see) a major shift in the locus of mass communication. New technologies like cheap recording cameras and the Internet haven’t just made it easier for traditional media to reach their audience, they’ve made it possible for the audience to take control of the message.
The old idea of “feedback†was that a newspaper or TV new show would have a number where people could call and leave messages. Or an address people could write to. So, if you had something to say about what big media was doing, or if you just had something to say, you’d meekly send a message off to an ombudsman or public editor and wait and hope they’d print it. In the New Media age, journalist (and journalism students) properly imagined that feedback would be enhanced; that was a good thing. The Internet would allow us to get more opinions and responses from our readers and viewers.
So, how to do that? Well, an e-mail address! Interactive polls! Discussion boards! Look at all that great feedback coming…back.
But letting more people contact their newspaper’s ombudsman is not one of the great triumphant promises of the Internet. Happily, it had more in store for us than that.
After a while, people got sick of waiting and hoping. And they decided they didn’t want their “feedback†posted on a letters page of a newspaper, they wanted an even bigger audience. So they did something that, because of new technology, had become ridiculously easy; they started a Web site.
And that, I believe, has started a real transformation in what the word “journalism†means. Putting aside the question of which are more trustworthy, blogs or old news, there’s no question that blogs are producing at least as much (if not more) content as old news. That’s a staggering shift. On one hand you have hundreds of huge organizations with payrolls and facilities and trained professionals. On the other hand you have millions of individuals and small groups; most unpaid and untrained. And yet blogs can compete with traditional news media outlets in terms of the amount of information they are distributing.
How long before this change reaches the rest of the information market? How long before home-movies distributed compete with Hollywood for the eyes and ears of valuable consumers? How long before academic journals have to compete with academic blogs for control of that niche? What will be the first major discovery to be announced in a blog? Or has is already been announced?
No one was surprised by the information age; we knew it was coming. But what we didn’t realize was control of the world’s new most valuable resource would be distributed from the ground up.