How the Internet is reshaping journalism

Liselotte, a 23-year-old journalism student at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, wrote to ask questions for a research paper on new approaches to journalism and publishing. Here are her questions and my answers:

To date, what have been the most significant changes in journalism since the arrival of the Internet?

I’ll name three:

1) The Net as a research tool. The Internet is the most incredible research tool ever invented, and during the past three years the vast majority of reporters have climbed aboard and been dazzled by its deep and rich treasures. There’s an entire branch of journalism devoted to Computer-Assisted Reporting and Research, but really all journalists are becoming digital journalists, whether they’re in print, broadcast or online.

2) Accountability. If a journalist makes a significant mistake, or is too lazy to make the extra phone call or conduct the research to get his or her facts straight, you’ll hear it from your online readers. Because facts and accounts can now often be verified at the click of a mouse, the whole world is now your fact-checker and proofreader, not just your publication’s editors.

3) Speed. The Net is speeding up our instant-gratification culture. That’s not a judgment call, just a reality.
I’ve written often about the dangers of Speeding Net News — too often the chant is I’d rather be first than right — and this is a trend that all responsible journalists need to watch closely. For more on the subject, see, for example, this column on some of the perils posed.

What is still missing in online journalism? How can it be changed?

The chief missing ingredient in online journalism today is interactivity. Only a handful of online publications make their reporters and editors available to interact with users in any meaningful way. Many online journalism publications still don’t do something as rudimentary as publishing their reporters’ e-mail addresses.

The problem is that many online publications still haven’t evolved past the we-publish-you-read mindset of the print world. But the Web is a fundamentally different medium. Online should be more of a dialogue than a one-way conversation. It’s not a one-to-many mass medium, it’s a one-to-one and many-to-many medium.

It has been claimed that everyone’s a journalist on the Web. Do you agree? Why/Why not?

Not everyone is a journalist on the Web. People surf, rant, spam, write poetry, keep personal diaries, post photos of their cats, and none of that is journalism.

Having said that, there are a great number of people who have taken on the mantle of journalist. You don’t need to write or work for a professional publication with a slick Web site to be an online journalist. All you need is a computer, Internet connection, and an ability to perform some of the tricks of the trade: report what you observe, synthesize and analyze events in a meaningful way, but most of all, just be honest and tell the truth.

A high school freshman videotaping a faculty strike and uploading clips to the Internet with his commentary on the situation is, for all intents and purposes, an amateur news journalist. A college student keeping a Weblog about the latest doings in the tennis world is an amateur sports journalist. And these “amateurs” have just as meaningful a role in the future of news on the Net as do the professionals.

Please see my new 2-part series in OJR on this topic, here and here.

There are a lot of established journalists that now run their own news publications, columns etc. Do you think we will see more of that, or is that phenomenon going to die? Could you make a living from running your own news publication? Will you be able to in the future?

I think we’ll see a lot more of this, especially the phenomenon of writers making names for themselves by writing online columns. But I suspect it will be at least a generation before anyone can support himself or herself as a journalist by self-publishing in this way. Perhaps the best-known journalist now doing this is Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com), who recently collected $10,000 from contributors to his Web site, but that’s only a small percentage of his yearly income from writing for mainstream publications like the New Republic. Even Matt Drudge wasn’t making a dime off of his Web site, and he was drawing hundreds of thousands of hits not long ago.

What does the future hold for self-publishing? Since major news organizations *today* can’t seem to fashion a workable business model, I’d have a hard time predicting how independent journalists will be able to do so. But since I’m currently an independent online journalist, I sincerely hope someone makes this work!

What will happen in journalism in the next 5-10 years? What do you hope will happen?

Feel free to quote any of these thoughts that I gave to PBS or that I’ve published on my Weblog here. We’re near the nadir of a terrible downswing in the online journalism business, but this, too, shall pass, and as multimedia and fatter broadband pipes gain a more solid foothold throughout the world, and as an increasing number of amateur journalists ply their craft with honesty and integrity, we’ll be seeing exciting new forms of online reporting take shape.

Good luck, Liselotte!

For other responses to students, see this page.

This entry originally appeared June 26, 2001, on my Manila blog.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.