What role should journalists adopt in the Web 2.0, citizen journalist world of 2006? Jeff Jarvis thinks he has at least one of the answers. Quoting Gruner + Jahr boss Bernd Kundrun (after translation from the German) he suggests “moderator”. It is striking how quickly this idea is gaining ground. Jonas Bonnier (left) made the same suggestion at the PPA Conference in London last week. In fact, he went further, saying he didn’t want his journalists wasting their time writing original articles; rather they could be gainfully employed polishing and packaging what had already been written either professionally or by the citizenry. Not an idea without controversy, I suspect…
It depends if you want investiative journalists or editors of secondary sources. If your organisation decides that it can trust those sources, as we do with ICIS news then fine. But if you don’t, then you need someone to get their sleeves rolled up and get on the phone or get out and visit people don’t you?
All the best
I agree, but it’s worth considering how the effort is divided up. The risk is that we carry on doing as we did before, but the world moves on…