28 May 2001

Web Logs Transforming Journalism? You wouldn't be surprised to find an article which suggests that journalism may be transformed by weblogging at the Online Journalism Review. Doc Searls goes further here: Peer-deprived journalism will die of exposure, right along with the advertising projects its publishers continue to fund under the illusion that its constituency is an "audience" rather than a bazaar filled with sources and fact-checkers... Journalism as Usual lived at a certain level in a world without the Web. In that world where there wasn't a peerage of highly open sources. To live in the new world, journalism has to work at a deeper level, or it won't survive. However, I wonder whether a journalist's inherent mode of operation might be rather more 'closed source' than 'open source: would his or her self interest lie in letting other people, including his competing fellow journalists, know what stories he was working on, and the angle of upcoming stories? 4:25:25 PM