Wonder if you spotted Mark Day’s column on blogging where he can see one model of delivering valuable journalism. And there seems
a tendency to judge the quality of the blogosphere, whatever that may be, by the quality of commenters on the The Australian’s various blogs and comment boards.
I think it’s like that when you are in bunker. I used to be in one for years. Now I venture into bunkers occasionally, filing copy for the AFR, FT, The Australian and others. And while I have done some formal, but as yet incomplete, study into the scholarship of teaching journalism, my perspective is very much more alligned with that of the many individuals
that like me are flying solo.
Part of me remains attached to the older model of high quality journalism. But I saw this at work at the Financial Times where there was a bigger network of focors and specialists than almost anywhere. But few places have that any more, if they ever did.
Journalists must now be very diverse in order to survive, and increasingly they will work for one or more niche outlets. Already they outnumber msm journalists, a fact that is often overlooked. This post by John Cokley on Crikey speaks to this here.
Many see blogging and their communities as integral to their journalism. There is a new site I write for that is made up of an editorial site and a social networking site, where the blogs are regarded as highly as the editorial and some of the most popular stories they run.
The site takes copy from freelancers and pays a couple of journalists to post comments and contribute to discussions. More on that in a later post.
I would say that I am representative of many mid-err-(let’s not say senior yet) career journalists, who learned under the old model, but see the way it’s going, and are out there on their own trying to figure out ways of surviving and getting in on this. I also tutor and can’t help looking at the old school stuff in the units, and feeling that it is preparing people for careers already redundant. People tell me they want to write, and so I tell them to write, and that they can start a blog today.
This can lead to professional opportunities with media outlets or of their own making. ( I am currently mentoring a UQ student who in turn is teaching me stuff, and we are creating some niche blogs. This a unit of study for her – more in a later post). Anyway blogs give a space to hone writing craft and get used to the online medium. I did this with a personal blog where I experimented both with my writing style and in how to pull in an audience.
The difficulty for me was in getting used to the freedom and finding my voice and in not easily letting go of the old school journalism rules of interviewing people and checking stuff. Yes, there is a lot of poor quality stuff out there on blogs which people tell themselves is equal to good journalism. But I have found that quality can be found in many places and I have also found that many people will believe anything.
For me the attraction of blogs has always been in reading about people, seeing issues and stories through their stories. A post on that later too.
I am looking forward to the panel with Cristen Tilley, Mark Bahnisch and Axel Bruns. I like the way that both Mark and Axel frame the bigger arguments and discourse. Sometimes it is
difficult to focus on these issues outside of the normal requirement to survive.
For me, I see many opportunities and the debate fascinates me, but I get waylaid by the next assignment, which I must do, unfortunately not to save our democracy, but to pay the bills…
