Floating Island

During our first class, I looked up Joi Ito’s Web ahead of his appearance. As I was scrolling through his recent blog posts I found myself distracted by his diary of a vegan diet. Now of course, Joi was not coming to our class to discuss how giving up meat and dairy products has changed his life. He came to discuss topics that were relevant to us as budding journalists—the new media landscape, the role of bloggers, and the copyright model represented by his work with Creative Commons.

Nevertheless, my digression highlights one of the great powers and perils of the internet– that it’s great at drawing our attention away from central narratives and towards the peripheries. One of the best illustrations of this phenomenon is Boing Boing—when I was introduced to the site in 2001 I never imagined would become the the most favorite website of all websites (according to technorati).

As far as journalism goes, the internet is a great equalizer. It’s no longer necessary to own a business with a printing press and staff to create a successful publication, nor do we have to convince these publications to hire us in order to get our voices out. In his article, “Take a Blogger to Lunch,” Keith Jenkins describes how the new media environment erodes the elevated position enjoyed by the mainstream news media (MSM, as Jenkins calls it), who may need to give up part of their gatekeeping function to gain credibility among their new media audiences.

Online media also allows us, as audiences, to decide what content is important and tailor our viewing accordingly. For example, I’ve used YouTube to catch up on network news from the U.S. along with a friend’s made-in-Hong Kong home movies. In a sense my choices reflect the communities that I’m part of—personal, political, professional, and so on.
Personally, when it comes to getting news, I haven’t much distinguished print from online media—what matters to me is the content, not the form. (Though I notice that I do tend to read more when I have a print version in front of me). I started reading NYT and other news online from China in 1998. Basically there wasn’t any other option at the time. It was online or nothing. Nowadays, with most other news that I read—WSJ, FT, IHT— even if I have to pay for an online subscription, it’s far more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than reading print editions.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me that online and print editions have been treated so distinctly within the news organizations that run them. I naively thought that content from the newspaper simply made its way online just with the help of some IT folks, and that online editions generally reflect print, plus or minus a few extra features. I still just want to read the news and don’t use online-only features very much, with the exception of archives, which are indispensable.

As it turns out, online journalism can represent a distinct career path, as illustrated by the Fang Wang, assistant news editor for FT.com. Or it can merge with the traditional work of a print journalist. Last week, when Newsweek’s Ron Javers spoke at the JMSC about journalism and new media, he noted that today’s writers are often asked to prepare shorter versions of their articles for the web and to make television appearances to discuss and publicize their stories. For student journalists, the new requirements may pose a bit of a challenge. Unlike our more experienced counterparts, we cannot afford to learn the nuts and bolts of traditional media first and leave the new media for a future date– we’ve got a much steeper learning curve, simultaneously trying to learn web and video skills while not sacrificing the quality of our reporting and writing. The added stress of this new proposition is palpable in the comments section of Anthony Moor’s “Go to the web, young journalist!”

And still, there’s a lot to be said for the credibility bestowed by traditional news media. It would be a dream come true for many of us to be able to develop content online and get paid for it, but there are no shortcuts to training and experience. It’s hard for me to imagine any effective substitute for the type of skills that are developed in the classroom and the newsroom. And print still seems to carry an aura of superiority among journalists—I guess there’s no substitute for seeing one’s name in print.