Anthony Moor’s article and the story on Fang Wang of the Financial Times had made a strong point on the immediate need of web literacy as for a journalist.
The purpose of acquiring all these online skills is for us to apply the fundamental news reporting principles and disciplines (e.g. accuracy, fairness etc.) in the Internet world which is now overwhelmed by information that were written and posted without the journalistic values.
I agree with Alvin Cross, Director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues that bloggers and journalists have many things to learn from each other. In his comment on Keith W. Jenkins’ article, he wrote,
“They (bloggers) may not be journalists, but are exercising their journalistic rights under the First Amendment, and we should take any available opportunities to impart the values of journalism to their work.”
The time for me to adapt the journalistic principles in my blogging has come (resisting the temptation of “copy and paste” will be the number one challenge). It’s time for a change – behave professionally and stop writing sentimental reflections to entertain myself.
However, it is not just about writing news and providing contents. Online journalism is also about creating a platform for interaction with the readers and other sources.
As far as I could observe, local newspapers in Hong Kong have not gone very far from the routine of remaking the print version into an online version. Although most of them are constantly updating their sites throughout the day, the use of multimedia materials and interactions with the readers are still minimal.
Nonetheless, media such as the Apple Daily did make use of the web by selecting newsworthy comments from their discussion boards as their sources and compiled them into a regular section called “news@apple” on both the print and online versions. Readers’ contributions to their news contents are starting to surface.
As we enter the era of Web 2.0 where human connections are most valuable to share common knowledge, journalists ought to hold on to their professional standards while constructing a new model of delivering news that can be useful to the society as Francis Pisani, freelance blogger and columnist, said in the article Journalism and Web 2.0:
“Rather than assuming a defensive position to these challenges, journalists ought to join in conversation with those who aren’t trained as we are and find ways to help them understand and acquire the values and skills that make what we do socially useful.”
Useful information:
- The Online Journalism Review has given some guidelines on “How to write for the web”.
- The idea of Web 2.0 was shown in a more visually impressive way in Markus Angermeier’s mind cloud.
2 Comments
February 7, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Nice analysis with some good examples and choices of links. Good job of citing and linking back to the readings, and showing that you’ve read them all.
February 9, 2007 at 2:32 am
[...] look forward to taking part in building the Web 2.0 and beyond, yet there is also some dismay that Hong Kong’s local media are not keeping up with the pace of change, and that China’s repressive media environment means that bloggers [...]