I've been thinking more lately about this issue, in spite of myself. Primarily, I am wondering about that imaginary line that slowly fading away between professional and citizen journalists (a term that if it wasn't coined by someone at HuffPost, was definitely made popular by them.) Analysis of the issue isn't hard to find, and has been going on for years. I was only slightly surprised to see content dated from 2003.
This diary is x-posted from Everything in Its Own Time.
For me, it's been hitting home severely lately, in part because I got a bright idea and it started taking off more quickly than I figured in some ways. One way in particular was a nearly immediate attention from who? The press. Admittedly, it is exclusively small town media outlets for the moment, but it's still saying something on a political information project that is pre-public-launch.
And then I remembered something about where bloggers get their information. Turning that on its head, I'm dealing with becoming a news source, and being part of the next logical step in the evolution of journalism. Timeliness is a hindrance to most traditional media outlets. Twitter, instant messaging services, and cellphone texting are stock and trade for both the bloggers and the traditional journalists now. Doubt that? Take a gander at my Twitter profile, and more importantly the folks I follow (something you can only see if you are logged in to Twitter.) Admittedly most of the traditional journalists tend to trade inside comments amongst themselves, but they are still using it.
Hours are like days in the online world of news. "Breaking news" becomes "old news" within minutes sometimes. I feel guilty passing on a link to a news item if it's older than an hour or two, figuring that it's already been reposted hundreds of times. (And usually I'm right on that one.)
With the advent of electronic readers like Kindle trying to create a niche in the book industry, coupled with computers and 3G technology, talk about a "greener" society takes on a whole new meaning. The days of paper are numbered. So are the days of trivializing bloggers as news sources. The irony is that each time a blogger breaks a big story, it's not remembered for long because of the nature of technology and society. Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame is rapidly reduced thanks to the blogosphere. To protect themselves from extinction, I guess the best advice I could give to the traditional journalists is to do what those local media folks are doing with me - keep your eyes on the ones who are making and reporting news, even in the blogosphere.