The Journalist of Tomorrow
Doug Millison is a freelance writer and editor based in El Cerrito, Calif. He created and taught the first course in online journalism at San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program. You can reach him through his Web site.
In a Matt Drudge world where anybody can publish a Web page and disseminate information by e-mail, where journalists join lawyers and politicians as the professionals least trusted by the public, do we even need professional journalists anymore? That people ask this question suggests to me a widespread, fundamental misunderstanding of what journalism is and how journalists work, and why they are needed in the online environment.
The lay of the online land
The word journalism comes from the Latin diurnus, or "belonging to the day." Much journalism retains a daily character, although the genre stretches to contain any nonfiction or documentary narrative that reports or analyzes facts and events firmly rooted in time (either topical or historical), and selected and arranged to tell a story from a particular viewpoint.
Nothing in this definition would exclude much of the material, produced by non-professionals, that circulates on the Internet through e-mail, chat rooms, bulletin boards and e-zines. Some people suggest this sort of material might replace professionally produced journalism, while others insist that it should replace the offerings of publications and other media outlets so compromised by political loyalties or dependence on advertising revenues that they no longer can be trusted.
That is the way things work in countries with government-controlled media, of course. I recently spent a month in the People's Republic of China (PRC). There, people in all walks of life trust the mass media only for hints of what is happening and turn to other sources to learn what is really happening.
China Central TV and the People's Daily long have paled in comparison with the grapevine of whispered reports stemming from insider Chinese sources. Add to that foreign media reports most often relayed secondhand by mail and fax but, increasingly, obtained direct from cable TV and the Internet.
In the PRC, there is no shortage of information to supplement the untrusted, official media outlets. But the Chinese citizen faces the same problem the Internet user faces: what to believe in this swirl of words and images, this melange of news reports, rumors, "advertorials," disinformation, gossip, marketing hype and propaganda?
The key element to communication: trust
Trust seems to be the key- which voices and images to trust?
News magically appears everywhere in the mass media -- a function, it would seem, of strategically placed cameras and microphones. But few people glimpse the behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts effort that produces journalism: the reporter's process of gathering information, vetting sources, corroborating and checking facts; the editor's process of working with a reporter's output, choosing what to include and what to suppress in the final product, determining the order of presentation, selecting visual and audio images, rewriting, integrating and presenting the whole.
Digital cameras, tape recorders and the Internet let non-professionals publish and reach audiences previously available only to corporate or governmental entities that controlled the necessary production tools and distribution channels.
But the newcomers lack an essential component possessed by many professional journalists and the media outlets that employ them: trust, based on a track record of journalistic reports that have proven to be reliable, augmented by the frank admission of errors and mistakes that creep into the coverage.
To the extent that non-professional Internet publishers fail to gain this trust, by proving themselves reliable over time, they will remain marginalized, mere bits and bubbles in the Internet's digital flood. They will pose no threat to professional journalists.
To the extent that non-professionals acquire the skills and follow the processes that distinguish reliable, professional journalists and publications, the non-professionals will tend to become in many ways indistinguishable from professional journalists. The emergence of trusted Web-based publications created by people without formal training as journalists but who have acquired solid journalistic tools and skills illustrates this convergence.
Building a better journalist
What future, then, for professional journalists online?
They will have to look to the Internet to learn which issues are important to their audiences and what the public is saying about them, then inform the Internet discussion with the kind of reporting, presentation and analysis that always has characterized the best journalism. Professional journalists also can apply their skills to help audiences know what is to be trusted and what lacks credibility in Internet journalism.
They will use interactivity to turn readers into co-creators
The best online journalists will use the resources available to them to move beyond newspaper, magazine, radio, and TV news shovelware and instead produce journalism that taps the native strengths of the Internet. They will use hyperlinks and multimedia to create rich webs of narrative, image and sound, and to present audiences with multi-faceted and multi-layered journalistic "collages" to explore and study. And they will use interactivity to turn readers into co-creators.
Feed magazine's "The Loop" illustrates how professional journalists can combine contributions from subject-matter experts and audience participants into a whole that is richer and deeper than what might have been produced by either journalist or expert alone. Slashdot does a similar job in the realm of technical news.
Now more than ever, we need professional journalists to help distinguish the wheat of reliable news and credible opinion from the chaff of information, rumor and propaganda that clogs the Internet, and to help create the next-generation vehicles for online journalism.