Mar 29 2008
The Reporter Problem
Will news reporters have a job in the future? Professor Steve Boriss, who teaches a class called “The Future of News” at Washington University in St. Louis and writes on the subject at Pajamas Media: “We will continue to have news middlemen, but those that survive must create real value for their audiences. Editors can create value by aggregating, analyzing, adding opinions, and gathering like-minded audiences for advertisers. Bloggers do the same. But, reporters are repeaters. They, not bloggers, are unnecessary recyclers of news.”
Maybe Boriss knows better bloggers than I do. But I think the premise of his argument is flawed: namely that a journalist’s job is to transfer a record of an event to an audience that cares about it.
It assumes that there is too little information in the world and that a journalist’s job is to be the one that witnesses it. That may have been true thirty years ago, but let’s face it. There’s often too much information available today.
Let’s say you wanted to know if batteries were a good place to invest today. Where would you go for information on that? Going to Google is like sitting down in front of a fire hose and blasting yourself in the face. You could spend days and days sorting through all the different types of investment (public, private, mutual funds, etc…) then what type of battery (lithium-ion, nickel-cadmium, led-acid, lithium-polymer, thin-film, kinetic, etc…), or maybe what sort of company (developer, producer, distributor, integrator) then maybe which of the 100+ companies that do some sort of battery-related thing.
Moving from information to action requires throwing things out as you go along, getting from the fire hose to a nice drinking fountain. This is what journalists may be best at in the future.
2 Responses to “The Reporter Problem”
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[…] compete with these focused outlets? Is this even the proper role for a journalist or editor? I recently wrote on this, but am starting to wonder about […]
Alex, Thanks for reading my article. The function you are describing in your last paragraph I would call “aggregating,” not “reporting.” And I believe that aggregating is a necessary middleman function, per my quote that appears in your first paragraph. Keeping these terms pure is important for understanding my arguments. Here’s one where you mixed terms, still attributed it to me, and it threw you off: “namely that a journalist’s job is to transfer a record of an event to an audience that cares about it.” Note that you’ve substituted the word “journalist” for “reporter.” I never defined “journalist,” but you seem to have defined it as an amalgam of a reporter, aggregator, and editor, which I did not. I enjoyed reading your blog. Keep up the good work!