journalism

Writing for OJR.com, Robert Niles argues: “There's no need for professional reporters to fear user-generated content. Someone needs to lead the Web's content communities, and journalists make the ideal candidates.”

While I agree wholeheartedly that newspaper journalists should engage as leaders in the community conversation, I think it would be a mistake to overlook the shortcomings and handicaps we inherit from our past.

So here’s a counterpoint to Niles’ essay.

The other day, when commenting on the MinnPost.com announcement, I said "we may be heading for a world in which nothing is dominant."

Joel Kramer has unveiled -- sort of -- MinnPost.com, the Twin Cities web project he's been working on for months. Today's announcement tells us at least the major sources of funding (including former Cowles Media chiefs John Cowles and David Cox, and the Knight Foundation), and lists some stellar names among the journalists who will be writing for the site.

In an op-ed for the big paper on the left coast, journalism professor Michael Skube complains that "the blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined."

"One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more," he writes.

The badly flawed Shorenstein report arguing that local newspapers are the most seriously threatened by the Internet already has been properly shredded by Jeff Jarvis, but there's another angle that strikes me: sloppy use of the word "local."

I believe that "local" is a powerful asset, not a liability, and that the Shorenstein report has tripped over a lack of precision in the use of that word.

Bill Densmore and Chris Peck have posed three interesting questions to people who have signed up for the Aug 7-8 "Journalism That Matters" seminar in Washington, and to members of a Facebook group. Here are my answers:

1) How does a community support journalism at a time when traditional newspaper-generated revenue is drying up?

I'm less concerned about journalism at the community level right now than I am about journalism at the national/global level.

While reading coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this morning, I was reminded how, on the Internet, all the world's media resources are just one click away, which is a boon for consumers but creates a difficult environment for producers, who now have to compete with everything at once.