This is something of a brain dump post, as I am working on some ideas. I’ve been having conversations with some folks about a new journalism startup we’re hoping to launch sometime in the next year and am running into culture issues. One of them is the problem of how we classify the journalist.

We’ve been having this “are bloggers journalists?” argument for a few years now, and frankly I am sick of it. It doesn’t matter other than in the bounds of legality, and to be honest I don’t care. I don’t need a label to succeed. But that’s an industry-side fight that I’m all too willing to ignore, because the people who naysay the loudest often are the ones with turf to protect. If I was interested in protecting turf, I would have gone into landscaping.

There’s a flip side that does matter, though, because it affects how we remake this whole enterprise. It’s coming from average folks, those “people formerly known as the audience” who have a hard time revising their own definition. They’re people who see the problems with big corporate media and are more than happy for a new era where journalism comes from within rather than from the top down, which is great. But their conception of “journalist” and “journalism” is just as rooted in the old ways, which means they’re judging the new journalist with standards made for the days of top-down media flow. I find this unfair, and actually something of a threat to journalists seeking to do things a new way because it’s only going to encourage them to retrench into hierarchy – a bad deal for everyone.

Generally speaking, their notion of these terms is rooted in the sham myths by which journalists have operated for decades: objectivity, detachment, perpetual accuracy. They don’t account for the fact we’ve evolved, that we now know that objectivity and complete suppression of bias are a pipe dream more than a reality, and that it’s impossible for journalists to get it right all the time. To be fair, journalism as an industry has shilled these myths as a way of trying to control the conversation about why journalism matters, so it’s not like these user views come from nowhere. Read more

I already posted some of my lessons learned from my first SXSW, but I didn’t want to let the moment get away without chronicling my thoughts in general about the experience. I already said I should have done this a long time ago. I should add that I definitely will be back. This is a brain dump, in a way, trying to get at some of the sense of why I just liked being in Austin for this thing.

On the first day I attended a session called “How to rawk SXSW Interactive.” Much of it was fairly run of the mill (wash your hands to avoid the dreaded SXSW SARS, etc.), but one part stood out. They said that the best parts come in conversation, not in panels, and so doing it right means networking. A lot.

“This is your tribe,” one of the panelists said. “This is where you can talk about ideas and projects you’ve got and people won’t get glassy-eyed or want to run away.”

I thought the statement was silly. Tribe? Really?

Really. Read more

It doesn’t shock me at all that the early stages of the Haiti coverage were built on social media rather than professional media. We’ve seen this before when big news events happen and traditional lines of transmission inhibit the ability of news organizations to get the message out.

In the case of Haiti, the 7.0 earthquake damaged so much communication infrastructure that communicating the stories and images out of Port Au Prince was thrust upon the locals still shellshocked from the devastation. That my first thought after the disaster was to wonder how the citizen journalists on the ground would tell this story shows how far we’ve come. As a scholar I’m no longer fascinated and in awe of the notion of the citizen reporter. In my case, I found myself wondering last night what they’d do with it this time, how it would be different and more meaningful than past events.

Within hours, the New York Times was curating a social media roundup on its blog, soliciting voices from the region. The Los Angeles Times was aggregating tweets and attempting to verify whether the voices were hoaxes or actually coming out of Haiti, just one interesting professional media use of social media that looked like a next step highlighted today by the Sydney Morning Herald.

But that’s all stuff we’ve seen before, and as Mark McGwire would say, I’m not here to talk about the past. Read more