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Nieman Reports Winter 2006 Issue Goodbye Gutenberg Finding Our Footing Journalism and Web 2.0 'Tomorrow's potential readers are using the Web in ways we can hardly imagine, and if we want to remain significant for them, we need to understand how.' By Francis Pisani YouTube.com, the Web site where people freely upload and view video of all sorts, has nothing to
Web 2.0 is a catch phrase created after the dot-com crash to capture the dynamic capabilities and vision of the Web when many had lost hope in its potential. There is no towering new technology to
Though Web 2.0's definition remains in flux, its broad elements include these: Platform: The Web is the platform through which nearly everything can be done: e-mail, document writing and sharing, commercial transactions, phone communication, and much more. Receive/publish/modify: The platform allows interaction; once information is received or found, conversation begins. Users comment and they upload their own words onto blogs and wikis; they might even modify the platform itself. Broadband: The number of people whose computers have "big pipes" always turned on, and through which images, music and video can be transmitted, is on a rapid rise. Contributions: Broadband makes using the "read/write/program" capacity of the platform easier. This means more people are willing to share what they have with others. Network effects: Contributions build to create a sum of knowledge greater than its parts. Companies and technologies harness "user generated content" and develop business opportunities. This changes the nature of knowledge, suggesting the potential to harness collective intelligence. Journalism and Web 2.0 Change starts at the edges. That's where people—our readers and viewers—probe new practices. That's also where their emerging culture is forming, a culture in which they look at media from a different perspective. And so journalists' new thinking needs to begin at the periphery, where change comes quickly among the younger generation of users, and a lot more slowly for us. Tomorrow's potential readers are using the Web in ways we can hardly imagine, and if we want to remain significant for them, we need to understand how. Yet news organizations have been all too slow to notice movement in places that are away from what has been their center. Start with the search engines. A significant part of the traffic of news Web sites comes from them; people arrive at a story without going through any of the thoughtful editorial organization usually put in place by editors. For the same reason, the content that is kept behind pay-walls is not indexed and, therefore, does not exist. Cragislist.org, with its free online classifieds, siphons key revenue sources away from newspapers. But journalists can learn lessons there, too, from the way in which content is generated. Users place on the site what they have to offer, using a multimedia format if they desire and without limitation of space. Interactive software facilitates group creation that, in turn, contributes to brand recognition and people traffic. Wikipedia.org demonstrates that access to information and the capacity to publish are no longer the privilege of a select few. The tendency to produce errors is compensated by the capacity to correct them, or so the thinking goes. This dynamic approach offers context quickly, and with hyperlinks there is instantaneous access to in-depth information, an aspect of storytelling that news companies tend to ignore. (Information about the structure of the World Trade Center towers and a documented hypothesis about their collapse on September 11, 2001 were first published on this site.) Google News,
A plethora of lesser-known Web sites also allow users to handle information in ways that go far beyond the one-way approach of traditional media.
At the same time, the role of editors is under attack from three sides. On Google News and on sites such as Le Monde.fr, algorithms are used to redistribute stories onto the home page. Search engines direct readers to articles, effectively bypassing editors' guidance and, with RSS and aggregators, users grab what they want from sources they fancy and organize them in personalized spaces like NetVibes.com and tag them, too. The wildness of the Web means that news organizations must format their content on all kind of platforms and for all kinds of devices—hoping to capture the attention of users, wherever they are, and however they want to interact with the information. Today, users expect to engage the journalist directly and to "be" journalists, too. Although citizen journalism is still looking for viable formulas, it is clear that journalism, as Dan Gillmor likes to say, is now less of a lecture and more a conversation. Signs of such change abound. Madrid's El Pa’s makes it simple for readers to report an error. Next to its list of links of most recommended stories, Le Monde's site displays recent comments about articles. Clarin.com (Buenos Aires) lets users select the sections they want on the home page.
What's Ahead? Blogs, forums and readers' polls are ubiquitous, and the list of Web experimentation is as lengthy as it is prudent. But despite these reactive activities, a successful transition for journalism is far from guaranteed. During a recent panel discussion about the new media business, Gillmor spoke for many when he raised the specter of a "complete unraveling of business models for traditional journalism." Others spoke of the extreme slowness of the responses by traditional media. Yet all seemed to agree that no clear business model exists for the Web as a platform for the practice of journalism. A new news ecosystem has to evolve, adapted to the multifaceted participation of people who not long ago were called an audience. Just this adjustment in language indicates the enormity of the cultural changes underway. Confidence in many public and private institutions has also diminished—in some cases, been lost—and people use technological tools to do for themselves what distrusted institutions, such as the press, once did for them. Yet journalists can have a hard time understanding this shift—and the diminishment of trust with which their work is viewed—since many see themselves as critics of some of these institutions, too. Journalists want to hold tightly to their ethics and standards, yet they also realize that a business model must support their enterprise. The real difficulty is that the broad participation of others through Web 2.0 challenge journalists' share of the power they once held as conveyors of news and information as much as it does their ethics and sustainability. Their ideas will continue to bring change from the edges that will affect the work of journalists, as blogs did when they first appeared on the media's margins before being adopted by many mainstream news organizations. But change does not need to happen in this way. Rather than assuming a defensive position to these challenges, journalists ought to join in conversation with those who aren't trained as we are and find ways to help them understand and acquire the values and skills that make what we do socially useful. Francis Pisani, a 1993 Nieman Fellow, is a freelance blogger and columnist covering information technology and new media in the San Francisco Bay Area for several European and Latin American newspapers. He has lectured on these topics at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. Table of contents Printer-friendly format |
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