What do we call this new form of journalism and media?
With so many digital news, information and community sites popping up all over the place, using blogs, Twitter, CoverItLive, podcasts, video, social media, mapping mash-ups, searchable databases and other shiny new objects, it seems prime time to introduce a new name for all this hubbub.
The news industry calls it “new media” or “interactive media,” but that’s just differentiating it from legacy forms of publishing. Pretty much everything online is “interactive” and it’s not really “new” anymore.
“Online media?” Digital publishing?” Yawn.
Honestly, this has been bugging me for weeks. (I know, therapy is an option.) I’ve invited people in the Tacoma area where I live to gather at a local watering hole next week. I struggled with how to classify the meet-up. I resorted to “Tacoma bloggers and online media meet-up” but hope that independent bloggers, professional journalists and other walks of life are represented.
It’s media, but not necessarily journalism. As Clay Shirky deftly dissected in his book Here Comes Everybody, journalism is a profession, and to label something a profession means to “define the way in which it is more than just a job.” But often this new activity is only indirectly related to one’s job.
It will take a mix of all these tools, plus some that are just now being invented, to build successful new business models for the sustainable publishing of news/information/community in the future. What will we call that business, that industry, that specialty?
Check out Frank McGuire’s course at ASU (which looks fascinating, by the way). It’s called “The Business and Future of Journalism.” We know that future will be built digitally, but not entirely by journalists (since collaboration and social tools are so critical). So we can’t exactly call it “journalism.”
But what do we call it?
If you have any other ideas for a killer new name for all this, post a comment. Or steer me another direction of you think I’ve strayed off course.
I heard someone call it “newer media.” That sounds about right.
Hello to everybody!
I’m a portuguese journalist and a diary reader of this blog. I also have a blog. This week, I started to read Rebecca Blood’s “The Weblog Handbook” and, like she says,journalism is quite diferent from writting in a blog. As a journalist, I’ve got to follow some rules and I have a responsability that I dont’t have as a blog writer.
(P.S. – Sorry about my english)
You say profession is defined as “the way in which it is more than just a job.” Blogging either independatly or journalistically may be unrelated to one’s job, but maybe that description fits now more than ever.
Online media may not always be someone’s “job”, but can be considered more than that just because it is being used to reshape the entire industry. It will become more than that because journalists will not only have to transform their job but themeselves too.
Someone told me that being a journalist these days is kind of being like a backpack journalist, but with the added bonus of being proficient in the digital world too (in fact I’m pretty sure I’ve got a computer in my backpack right now…).
So in that sense it may still be journalists who shape this new industry. I think the challenge will be in diferentiating from the community they’ve immersed themselves in.
Maybe we can call it Media Backpacking. (eeeeeeerrrrr….or not…)
The problem with new media is that it a generational definition. New media is “new” to my generation and beyond. The Internet didn’t exist when I went to university 20 years ago. We barely had computers.
But to the 18-year-olds in my undergrad class, new media is not new. To them, it is just media.
I’d have to say that the term “multimedia” bugs me for similar reasons.
What about “pervasive media” or “ubiquitous media”?
You know I think we should waste the next 2 years thinking about this and let the next wave pass us by. Or steal my title and title your new little movement “slug media” and call it good.. Buzz words are for people who don’t get it.
I agree with Alfred’s comment.
Media is media in 2009. The sooner we all get into this mindset, the more quickly things will progress and the bigger the audiences will become.
‘Digital Media’ is an option.
The fact that journalism and journalists are using new tools to do the job does not change their whole job itself.
The applications and the websites mentioned are simply new ways of doing the same thing : communicating.
read more at :
http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2009/02/digital_media_does_that_cover_it.php
How about “participatory journalism?” Just found this B.T. (Before Twitter) University of Hong Kong paper about that very topic …
http://jmsc.hku.hk/faculty/alih/publications/amic-2004-wikipedia-rc2-wtitle.pdf
It’s a fun question. I side with those who say journalism is journalism and news media are news media. We are people who transmit information and opinions about current events, in contrast to historians and futurists. Though newspapers have been around for 400 years, the concept of “professional” journalism didn’t arise until Walter Lippmann began introducing the idea in the 1920s. Benjamin Franklin pointedly called himself a printer, even though he would be welcomed into the “professional” journalism priesthood today. Maybe all of us — journalists, bloggers, radio talk-show hosts, etc. — should simply be called scribes or digiscribes to avoid the loaded words media and journalism. They all fall along a wide spectrum of information providers from very good to very bad — that’s all.
The merging of social networks and journalism… How about social-ism? I believe the hyphen clears up any confusion.