Do you have a crystal ball? If so, can I borrow it?
Today is my deadline to submit the next version of Journalism 2.0 to my editor and publisher. The good news: I’m actually finished with the manuscript, all 80,000 words. The bad news: it will be at least four months until it’s available in print.
Whatever happens to journalism, technology and social media in those four months will not be included in the book. (That’s the paradox of writing a book about digital publishing; it appears hypocritical, but it’s the preferred medium of the target audience.) So I get to sweat through a summer of discontent, discovering new methods and innovations that would have been great additions to the book but will be left out.
As I submit the final draft, I can’t help but wonder what up-and-coming technology or method will “blow up” in the second half of the year and influence journalism the most? Tumblr? Google’s Wave? Internet TV?
My first book, for example, was published in 2007 (and recently passed 100,000 downloads) and didn’t include a single reference to Twitter. (Oops.) Now that I have almost an entire chapter on Twitter (and microblogging), will it still be relevant as 2009 comes to a close?
Here’s a tentative list of chapters for the book, tentatively titled Journalism Next and due out in mid-November. It looks a little different than my first attempt last September, but is surprisingly quite similar:
UNIT ONE: MULTIPLE PLATFORMS
Chapter 1: We are all Web workers now
Chapter 2: Blogging: Beyond the basics
Chapter 3: Crowd-powered collaboration
Chapter 4: Microblogging: Write small, think big
Chapter 5: Going mobile
UNIT TWO: MULTIMEDIA
Chapter 6: Visual storytelling with photographs
Chapter 7: Making audio journalism ‘visible’
Chapter 8: Telling stories with video
UNIT THREE: EDITING AND DECISION MAKING
Chapter 9: Data-driven journalism and digitizing your life
Chapter 10: Managing news as a conversation
Chapter 11: Building an audience online
I plan to continue posting excerpts from the book here. Feedback is still welcome, if not for the book, then at least for other readers of this blog. I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed so far, through comments on the blog, emails, answering questions or just conversation. The book is really just a collection of wisdom from all of you and many others. So if I missed the “next big thing,” it’s actually just your fault. 😉
Mark Briggs 
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The police section in Tucson, Ariz. has released raw video clip footage from the digicam law enforcement officer Joel Mann was donning when he brutally pummeled a woman pupil who was strolling innocuously just off the campus of your College of Arizona.