“Open” is the key to the news business survival
So says Jay Rosen in a column published today by the Washington Post. Rosen’s concluding illustration of the digital age storms that have rolled across traditional news media is Reuters’ tsunami woes:
On the day the Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Reuters had 2,300 journalists and 1,000 stringers positioned around the world, according to the firm’s chief executive, Tom Glocer. But none of them were on the beaches to witness the disaster, he told the Online Publishing Association.
The amateurs were there and they were prepared. “So for the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3 megapixel portable telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn’t have those pictures you weren’t on the story,” Glocer said. Reuters, a wire service, had to recognize there are more people in the press zone now — and integrate their material into its report. That should make us better, he said, but “you have to be open to both amateur and professional to tell the story completely.”
Exactly: To survive you have to be open. That’s where disruption in the news business looks a lot like renewal.
Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University where he is Associate Professor and former Chairman, 1999-2005, of the Department of Journalism. His ongoing analysis of the news media can be followed on his blog PressThink.
In his Washington Post column cited here, Rosen describes six disruptions that he says the Internet has caused for traditional news media:
The “closed” system of gates and gatekeepers has been busted open.
The new balance of power between producers and consumers.
Sources have more power to sidestep journalists.
The Net exploded the universe in press criticism.
The Net has exposed group think in journalism.
Disrupting the legacy media’s overconfidence.
The list of ‘disruptions’ may be in part or as a whole something that could be applied to other areas of the new global iCommons. I think this above list can be put more positively as not ‘disruptions’ but as ways the Net includes more people in to social processes ‘ like the amateur photographers of the tsunamis were. How would you list the points more broadly? How about rewording them as these good changes caused by the Internet within the iCommons:
Opening flows of new information.
Power shifts to those whom it affects.
New ways for amateurs to participate.
Bringing critics into an open exchange with their subjects.
Casting light into the processes of policymakers.
Showing old dogs that there are new tricks.