The Political Whore

By Jim Johnson
PoHo Contributor

Jim Johnson is the creator of The State of Sunshine blog.

Last month, I wrote a post here on Political Whore about US Airways flight 1549, which landed in the Hudson river with all aboard safe.  The first images where not from a major news organization or a photojournalist, they were from a bystander and were disseminated via Twitter.  It eventually prompted a response earlier this month from Michael Hussey at Pushing Rope with an interesting discussion about news.

In his post, as well as a follow-up, and the comments to both of them (here and here), Michael makes some very good points.

First, he shares my concerns about the current evolution taking place in the news industry:

I care about who will cover Tampa’s business and metro “news.” That won’t be bloggers going out there to report for free. The lack of community news coverage affects the quality of life and people we elect. Jefferson hated the Fourth estate, but he knew it was important.

Second, he rightfully argues that using new communication tools such as blogs or Twitter does not suddenly mean we are producing journalism. I see a difference between the message and the medium – new tools can be used for journalism, but not always.

In fact, the discussion of Twitter and journalists was taken a step further by Dave Poulson, a guest contributor to the Poynter Institute and Associate Director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. Poulson wrote of the interesting Twitter happenings during Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s State of the State speech:

Something happened Tuesday night that has me again thinking of the journalistic dimensions of Twitter.

I tuned in an Internet broadcast of Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s annual state of the state speech because it was expected to be laden with energy and environment issues. On impulse I logged into Twitter and asked my followers if there had been a hashtag established for the speech. There was: MiSOTS (Mich. State of the State).
…

Meanwhile, many, many, many other people used this hashtag to challenge points, support points, do some partisan sniping, question assumptions, add perspective, speculate about what was going on, and provide links to supporting information — including a transcript of the speech and the opposite (Republican) party’s response.

Poulson does say he isn’t sure if this is a “cool” fad or the wave of the future. I would say the latter.
The future of news…
Poulson goes on to find a role for journalists with Twitter: Perhaps a news organization could become become popular for spotting hashtag opportunities and quickly spreading the word. It might also try tracking down tweeters of interesting comments for traditional interviews.

The same could be used for blog posts, podcasts, and more. Especially, when you consider Wayne Garcia’s post a few days ago:

Google’s senior vice president of product management, Jonathan Rosenberg, wrote on the Google blog recently his take on what modern news media should be all about. He argued that the days of hoarding information are over (huzzah and cheers from me on that). He offers a techno-optimist pledge to find a way to monetize good Net information gatherers and distributors (journalists, experts, researchers, etc.) with a utopian “free the information and it shall set you free” vision.

You can see that Poulson and Rosenberg are offering essentially the same advice: news organizations offering a new service as “aggregators” or “filters” and providing analysis. This kind of service will be something organizations can monetize through online subscriptions, providing funding for the one thing crowdsourcing can’t do: investigative journalism.

To me, that will likely be the primary future of news organizations.

Posted in Media Watch, The Business of MSM | Leave a comment