Extinction and Journalism
My old friend and former colleague in IT journalism, Jenny Malapitan, wrote a couple of weeks ago about the looming extinction or transformation of journalists. She said that publishers today are increasingly looking for journalists who can create multimedia content. I remember a conversation I had with a top executive of IBM some six or seven years ago. Back then, the Internet bubble had not burst and many of the dotcoms were barely in the weaning stage. I remember the IBM guy saying that the Internet would need journalists who could present information in ways that would be interesting for users. Journalists with good presentation and multimedia skills would fuel the Internet boom.
Even as early as the late 90’s, there was already talk about the transformation of journalists in the face of the Internet technology revolution. I doubt that journalists are much more skilled in multimedia creation today as they were six years ago. Besides being able to create Friendster accounts and perhaps a blog or two, journalists today would probably have little IT technical skills to speak of. When I say technical skills, I don’t mean being able to tweak a notebook computer or customize an iPod, but I mean being able to create some cute application in Java or a fancy Flash movie. Those journalists who have these abilities are the exceptions and they make up a very small percentage of the population.
More than just the Internet itself, the creation of blogs in particular have put pressure on journalists, not to transform, but to enhance the intrinsic skills and traits that made them what they are in the first place. With blogs, people now have numerous sources of news, information and commentary. There’s no study yet, but I would surmise bloggers are being read more now than traditional news sources like newspapers, magazine and their online counterparts. With so many bloggers or so-called armchair journalists competing with traditional journalists for people’s attention, the traditional journalist has to come out with more credible, more interesting, and more insightful news and commentary than what these bloggers produce. This crisis does not require journalists to learn new tricks but it requires them to find a way for their intrinsic value to shine much brighter than ever before. It requires them to write much better, find more credible sources, seek out truth much harder, and become much more relevant in people’s lives everywhere than in the past.
So, do I think journalists, bred in the old-fashioned way, will become extinct? I seriously doubt it. Journalists are not like dinosaurs: they don’t become extinct with the changing environment. If there are journalists who disappear from the limelight, it doesn’t mean they’ve become extinct–they’re just pursuing a "new" story.
