A new ecosystem?
Jeff Jarvis, he of the big ideas, is imagining a new marketplace for journalism:
What we’ve just built is a new ecosystem of news that tries to make sure that more news gets covered. It’s collaborative and complementary, as I believe news will be – will have to be – in the future. Yes, one could also say it’s anticompetitive but that’s the last problem for news organizations today (and, again, this is the one idea on news’ future that I share with David Carr).
From a news organization’s perspective, once a consortium/marketplace/ecosystem is opened, up, it requires different skills to manage: finding and knowing talent and helping make it better – organizing, curating, educating. From the community’s perspective, we should hope that all the important stories don’t end up with just one reporter and one perspective (I think editorial ego will take care of that) but instead that more news gets covered.
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The pros need training in new media and new skills (while they still have jobs or as they reinvent themselves on their own) and the community often wants training in the essentials of new media tools and journalistic skills. The South Coast paper has trained more than 600 members of the community in an ambitious eight-week course and it is recruiting more. The Oakland Press is also holding classes. Papers and a university in Minnesota got a state grant to retrain professional journalists. Now add this: Trinity Mirror in the U.K. is hiring high-school kids to work on hyperlocal blogs. See also Robert Niles arguing that in their drive for professionalism, local news organizations (especially TV, I’d say) became disconnected from their communities and should be hiring from those communities.
The role of journalism education and journalism students in their communities will change as journalism changes. There’s a new ecosystem emerging and our roles in it will change as well.
Jarvis is always worth a read.
