Above is an image representing how journalism has traditionally been done:

1. You went and gathered your information
2. You put it all together in an attractive package: the article, the broadcast package
3. And someone else took that to the readers or viewers

That linear process is pretty much redundant online.

See the diagram below. I’ve found myself drawing this so often recently that I thought I should put it online and save some ink.

The point is clear. Thanks to networked technologies – and RSS in particular – there is no reason why newsgathering cannot also be news production, or news distribution. For example:

• You bookmark something on Delicious (newsgathering). That is published on Delicious, your blog, Twitter, and/or your news website (see Jemima Kiss’s PDA Newsbucket), and distributed via RSS which can be embedded anywhere
• You ask a question on Twitter (newsgathering). That is published on Twitter, and distributed via RSS – perhaps as a widget on your blog or Facebook.
• You film some raw material on your mobile phone using Qik. It’s published on Qik, with an update posted to Twitter too. The video feed is embedded on your blog or news site, and once again RSS distributes it anywhere you or someone else wants.

I could go on, but here are the implications: 1) a web-savvy journalist or news operation will seek to make as much of their activity visible in this way as possible, adding value to what they do and providing numerous access points for users. It’s for this reason I’m a massive fan of social bookmarking (it also makes it very easy to find things you read previously)

2) Journalism is becoming less polished, more iterative and more networked. Broadcast and print do the ‘finished version’ pretty well – online, we’re often happy with raw information, with the emphasis on ‘raw’.

3) As I’ve said before, the journalist (along with their readers) is now the distributor. You cannot leave that job to someone else. The more active, visible and social you are online, the better for your work both commercially and editorially.

Any thoughts? More examples?

PHP Freelancer

The 4th part of the results of my survey of blogging journalists looks at how blogs have affected how news production is affected by blogging.

The area where respondents most often identified a change in news production was in the rise of a looser, more personal, and less formal writing style, echoing the findings of Wall (2005). Respondents talked of finding their “voice”, being more informal and “creative”. For some this fed back into the mainstream news vehicles, particularly for broadcast journalists whose work previously involved less writing.

Some identified a move away from print- or broadcast-driven production processes, with some stories, for example, “written after the visual … rather than finding an image to support the story” (Respondent 26, Australia, newspapers), or vice versa.

The immediacy of the web was clearly a factor, with respondents noting that they worked more quickly, breaking stories on their blogs before following up both online and in print or broadcast. Related to this was a movement towards the iterative journalism that many theorists (Beckett, 2008; Bruns, 2005; Gillmor, 2004; Matheson, 2004) have identified in online journalism.

Brevity was also frequently mentioned, with journalists reporting writing shorter, more tightly edited pieces not just for blogs but also for print and broadcast.

Conversely, the web provided a space and technology for expanding in ways that print and broadcast did not allow.

“Stories that otherwise would have been footnotes in print can be explored more fully on the blog,” noted one (Respondent 33, US, newspapers).

Perhaps the most significant change was in the way that blogs provided a platform for stories or detail that would otherwise not make the print or broadcast version at all. Respondents talked of augmenting coverage that “would otherwise fall in the cracks”, of pieces that were interesting, but wouldn’t merit space in the paper, or that use elements that “don’t necessarily fit into the rigid lengths of radio pieces.”

It also meant journalists could link elsewhere when time or space constraints meant they were unable to report in full – to some extent fulfilling Jeff Jarvis’s rule (2007) of “Cover what you do best and link to the rest”

Read Part 5: Blogging and post-publication here.

Has blogging affected your news production processes? Let me know in the comments.

PHP Freelancer