When I attended last month’s Open House event at the Telegraph, I mused (during a chat with David Wilcox, posted on Google Video) about the status of journalists:
I just wonder if someone really had fire in their belly for a subject today, would they feel a need to become a journalist? Is journalism in itself as attractive and glamorous a career as it was five or ten years ago? (With blogging) I’ve got a platform to say what I need to say. And in many respects, I respect the people who don’t work professionally as writers, as communicators, as PR – because I want to hear from the people who ‘do the job’.
(By the way – having just done it, let me say it’s a very odd experience to transcribe your own words..! Sorry about the repetition of the word ‘respect’ there. Terrible.)
Shane Richmond, who straddles the two camps in his role as leader of the Telegraph’s blogging efforts, offered one (very valid) point in response: ‘when you phone people up and say “I’m calling from the Daily Telegraph”, stuff happens.’
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I’m very interested to see this week’s article in the Guardian by Jeff Jarvis, in which he notes:
In the midst of the Virginia Tech story, I was at the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention in Las Vegas, where two talented video bloggers – Zadi Diaz, of JetSet, and Amanda Congdon, ex of Rocketboom – both refused the title ‘journalist’ because of the baggage it brings, the expectations and demands. They don’t want to be on that side of the gate. They insisted – not unlike the Virginia Tech witness-reporters – that they are merely doing their own thing. They just want to be linked.
The only way (news organisations) can expand is to work cooperatively with witness-reporters, community members, experts, people who publish on their own, finding and sending readers to the best and most reliable among them. How? Via the link.