Let me tell you what happened at lunch yesterday.



I visited the Four Seasons Hotel in Central Hong Kong to listen to Robert Friedman, international editor at Fortune magazine, talk to a group of media professionals about online media and traditional news media. He was joined by his Asia editor Clay Chandler who talked about China and new media.

Then came a loose question-and-answer period. A man working for Intel, Ajay Mathur, told Chandler that it seemed possible that Fortune could one day be able to outsource 2,000 bloggers in Vietnam to do the research for his stories on Vietnam.

Chandler seemed to blanche noticeably at this suggestion. As a journalist, I can feel a little bit what Chandler must have been thinking. There is no way that anyone else, other than the journalist, can do the journalist's job in the narrow sense of collecting, reporting and writing the story.

Right, right, I hear you saying, but sure they can. No, they can't. As much as I would like for there to be tribes of citizen journalists out there--and there are, and I like them--I cannot see them working as collectors of information for journalists ensconced in traditional media jobs. Let me tell you why.

1. Journalism, as much as it purports to be the voice of a society or city, is written by individuals. News judgment can not be consolidated. In a newsroom, the most it comes down to is a sharing of thought either in team reporting or, most likely, in the meetings between editor and journalist on a very important story. A good editor, however, lets the reporter make his own assumptions and definitives. An individual alone must be responsible for gathering the news information and compiling it into something resembling data, which can then be folded into a consistent narrative. In the end, the journalist alone is responsible for the accuracy of the story and its honesty.

2. Okay, then what about those news stringers who go out in Baghdad and collect information for journalists? Exactly. Personally speaking, I think it's a bad idea. The journalist should do it. Yeah, he might get killed. But would you rather someone else getting killed for you or you getting killed? I take me getting killed. It's my story.

3. Also, there is a sixth sense to journalism. Usually, a reporter knows who is lying and who is telling the truth. Good journalists, that is. Yes, all people have a form of sixth sense. I am not saying that journalists have a better sixth sense for the method. But I am saying that an individual, who is responsible for dissecting information and finding a "truth," should not rely on others to find that information or create that angle.

Here is where there is the biggest breakdown in journalism.

This is its crisis. As papers have been unable to support a quality and large staff, they can rely less and less on a fully supported and fully capable reporting team. Things get "outsourced", and that, personally, is no good. Outsourced, to my mind, is a form of laziness. Others are responsible for a journalist's angles. Not good. I think traditional media are right to protect this method. They should do less to protect the brand.

What Mathur is saying is honest and very accurate. Why can't large and old media rely on tribes, or a collective consciousness, to do their work? I know that as a consumer of establishment media like the New York Times, Time, Youzhan Zhoukan, etc, I sometimes feel left out when I reckon I have another idea that could work for the story. Yes, that's my issue, but now there are ways to circumvent the establisment, and do it authoritatively.

In effect, the Internet is the physical embodiment of the collective consciousness.

My suggestion at the lunch was this: Allow users to contribute to the magazine, beyond the letters to the editor. News media can be training, reward and change all in one. And they can still make money.

Because it's always all about the money.

 

rion
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