What Was That Conversation?
Posted on October 14, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
Another conference on the future of newspapers and journalism, reported yesterday on Buzzmachine, brings another collection of cliches:
The journalist is a mediator between society and knowledge
News media is really about the customers/ consumers; no it’s really a collaboration
We, unlike old media, are involved in conversations.
Isn’t it about time to blow the lid off this idea of conversation? Who is having a conversation with whom? They’re not having a conversation with me. Not the newspapers I write for nor blogs like buzzmachine.
As often as I complain to editors who won’t let me write stories my way (some do, some don’t) or engage with an audience, and as often as I leave comments on buzzmachine and other “conversation” sites…. sorry, there is no conversation.
Blogging has quickly created impenetrable hierarchies in different subject spheres, just like career journalism establishes difficult-to-penetrate hierarchies in newspapers and TV. The editor who hangs on to tradition to reject a way of writing is like a blogger who pretends to have conversations.
There is lip service to the idea of conversation and then there are clichés at conferences.
Ask the average journalist what they think of this and it will vary according to how well they get on with their editor, how happy they are in their post, or whether they are freelance.
My guess is for most freelance journalists the disintegration of newspapers can’t come soon enough (There’s an element of fantasy here - being able to walk up to the editor who disrespects your work and say - now smile!). But if what’s replacing it is a blog called buzzmachine or techcrunch we’ll be thinking are we any better off?
If the clichés of objectivity from the news days are replaced by clichés about conversation then we’ve swapped the tyranny of one culture’s complacency with that of another.
As far as I can see only one blogger is having conversations - Scoble. And you know what, he says nothing. He trades conversations in place of moving a debate where real points of view work off against each other - but that’s tech blogging for you.
Where one-click publishing gets really interesting is the day journalists and bloggers band together and set up their own enterprises selling their own advertising - as have British political bloggers recently at Message Space, building audiences for novel points of view.
It starts to work when we create new publications that reflect a strong point of view. Let me put that another way - when we stop expressing a point of view about journalism and blogging and start expressing a point of view about life. That’s really the missing element, isn’t it - a novel way of looking at troubled times.
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