The impact of web news

Reading the State of the News Media 2007 report in more detail, one of the really interesting conclusions is that:

While journalists are becoming more serious about the Web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored

Currently most models for news online fall into one of three categories:
Aggregators of other people's content (Google News, Daylife.com); Social functionality around news, including self generated content (Newsvine, Digg); and traditional news organisations migrating online (BBC, Guardian, New York Times, - and I would include Yahoo in this category given the way they operate). The boundaries between them are grey and  some are trying to integrate the characteristics of more than one category - but there is no compelling site which delivers all three as yet. (Anyone got any money? I have a few ideas...)

The report goes on to talk about the impact on journalism more broadly:

Our sense remains, too, that traditional journalism is not, as some suggest, becoming irrelevant. There is more evidence now that new technology companies have had either limited success in news gathering (Yahoo, AOL), or have avoided it altogether (Google). Whoever owns them, old newsrooms now seem more likely than a few years ago to be the foundations for the newsrooms of the future. But practicing journalism has become far more difficult and demands new vision. Journalism is becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix. The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows. Journalists have reacted relatively slowly. They are only now beginning to re-imagine their role.

I think it's right that we are only just beginning to re-imagine the role of journalism in the age of online information.

Comments

[Fergus]

An example of online investigative reporting which implies a fourth catagory of online journalism is theyrule.net (it's been around for a few years now, and a lot of people have seen it, but oddly enough it's not really been copied).

It's an elegant and usable front end on a database of American Boards of Directors, their members, links and, amongst other things, their donations to political parties.

It does take some imagination to define theyrule.net as journalism; really, it just sets an agenda and gives users a tool to create a story which is relevant to them; but one that uses true data.

The skill set required for building theyrule.net would have included programming and interface design as well as the traditional journalist's skill of story selection.

[Richard S]

Thanks Fergus - I hadn't seen theyrule.net.....

[tom abate]

Richard, your posting promted me to write about creating discussion forums around stories. I hope to experiment with this notion in print. See details in this posting from my personal blog:
http://minimediaguy.org/2007/03/22/reinventing-journalism-from-scoops-to-solutions/