Mathew Ingram posed an interesting piece, No, Twitter Is Not a Replacement For Journalism, on Gigaom. I have covered this topic a bit already. (see The New Twitter Journalism or if your prefer, Le Nouveau Journalisme Twitter) as well as: Can Social Media Support Quality Journalism? Matthew is responding to a statement by Jeff Jarvis on how the “article” or traditional news story may no longer be necessary. Matthew states that Jeff makes the point that with so much real-time reporting via social networks, the standard news article has become a “value-added luxury.”
Jeff then responds that he was taken out of context. He writes, “I do *not* say that the article will no longer be necessary. I say that in some cases it will not be. Huge difference. I say that good articles add perspective and it is in that context that I say they are a luxury that can — and should — add value is hardly pejorative…articles must add value or we shouldn’t waste precious resources on them.”
Regardless of who is right on how you interpret Jeff’s remarks, they do raise an interesting issue, the role of journalism in the social media age. Matthew makes some excellent points on this topic. He first notes that, “the fact that those on the ground in Tahrir Square and in Libya can tell their own stories to some extent instead of relying on reporters from mainstream media outlets is hugely powerful.
Matthews then adds the more subtle, but no less powerful, pointing out the concept of “news as a process,” He writes, “that instead of something that is produced by media outlets as a kind of finished product, an artefact of an industrial-style approach to the news, journalism now is an ongoing and somewhat messy process.” There are stories or rumors that then get refined over time.
Building on this he goes on to write that the presence of social media, “increases the need for curation and context and background and reporting. Watching the stream of thousands of tweets that (Andy) Carvin (0f NPR) produced during the uprising in Egypt was fascinating and compelling, but it was also overwhelming in terms of the sheer magnitude of data.” Matthews concludes that “we still need people to curate and make sense of that stream. If anything, in fact, we need *more* of them, whether we call them journalists or not, as the amount of information we are trying to consume continues to increase.”
I could not agree more. Readers of this blog will know that I can resist bringing up a Darwin Awareness Engine™ example since it is designed to address this curation need and allow you to make sense of information overload.
As an example, Rob Paterson, working with PBS to help cover the immigration in the US, said, “What Darwin enables you to do is to see a pattern. To see a pattern you must be ready to see it so you must have a hypothesis on any topic that is complex. Darwin enables me to set up the feeds to reach deeply into the various components of my hypothesis… Then, as step three, Darwin presents me with layers of results every day based on these feeds.”
Darwin provides the content aggregation and shows the themes so you do not have to spend energy looking through multiple sources, but rather focus on the emerging patterns from these sources. It can complement Twitter and other social media sources to help focus the journalist’s efforts. I use it this way to help cover the enterprise 2.0 space for this blog through the Darwin Edition on enterprise social media.
complement
Posted by: John Carrier | August 18, 2011 at 09:27 AM
The title of this blog post certainly makes a strong argument for the role of the editor and proof-reader...complement not compliment
Posted by: Scott Holz | August 18, 2011 at 10:30 AM