Reporting
Jim Lehrer was on On Point tonight. His point: there will always be a demand for high-quality, professional news reporting. And so therefore it will always exist. Yes, people fire off emails and bloggers do their posts, but what they're all doing is reacting to the news — and where did the news come from? From professional reporters.
If you listen to the clip, you can hear his total dedication to the cause of mainstream news gathering. Someone has to collect the news, he says. Yes, we need to align the revenue streams with the news reporting, but we'll do that. We'll survive, he says. Online portions of news organizations are doing extremely well, he says.
Jay Rosen, meanwhile, is taking on the challenge:
It's a “put up or shut up” moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like… distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting… and put them to work to break news?
This is the question to which Jim Lehrer's answer would be, “No way.” No such thing. Professionals gather news and assess what's a story and what isn't. Just a small matter of finding a sustainable business model, but we're not leaving.
To find out what Jay Rosen has in mind, and what the rest of the wise crowd thinks is possible for non-traditional news reporting, it sounds like the place to be is BloggerConIV (on June 23, late morning, San Francisco).