The Winter 2008 issue of Nieman Reports, house publication of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and the Nieman fellowships, is mostly devoted to exploring the digital future of journalism.
This many-voiced, worthwhile, substantial effort candidly details newspapers’ foot-dragging failure to embrace the Web and new media. It also examines some obstacles to moving newsrooms online, as well as new efforts such as the Spot.us journalism crowdfunding project. Furthermore, it attempts to provide a primer on blogging, wikis, social networking, viral video and why younger news consumers really are different.
The issue includes some excellent essays. University of California neuroscientist Kenneth Kosik explores the legitimacy of wiki-based knowledge. Harvard Berkman Center social media researcher John Kelly discusses how blogs — often perceived as fracturing traditional media — sometimes focus the net’s attention back toward the best legacy journalism.
Particularly fascinating was the piece in which the managing director of Northwestern’s Media Management Center, Vivian Vahlberg, explained how newspapers that cram their sites with every possible bell and whistle are misinterpreting what their youngest readers want; millennials prefer online offerings that are lean, curated and respectful of their limited time.
If you have time for nothing else, at least read this list of “10 ways to help newspapers transition to digital media” by Edward Roussel, digital editor of the Telegraph Media Group.
As a former newspaper journalist, now Web journalist (and blogger, Twitterer, Facebooker, LinkedIn-er, Flickr-er and so on), what I appreciate most about this issue of Nieman Reports is the affable but uncompromising toughness of its authors to lead journalists to the new reality.
In “Journalism as a Conversation,” Katie King, creative and development editor for MSN in the United Kingdom, wrote: “Today digital publishing is practiced by the masses, and it’s inseparable from the practice of journalism. Newsgathering and distribution has changed forever, and the audience is part of the process.”
In “The End of Journalism as Usual,” Mark Briggs, former assistant managing editor for interactive news at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., and now CEO of a digital start-up and a consultancy, wrote: “As I travel and talk with news professionals looking for ways to add Web 2.0 elements … to their online operations, I’m no longer surprised to hear an editor or reporter say, ‘Readers won’t do that on a news site.’ This type of response is an admission of failure.”
In “The Wisdom of the Crowd Resides in How the Crowd Is Used,” Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired magazine and crowdsourcing expert, wrote: “There’s a lot that the crowd can’t do — or, at least, isn’t interested in doing.”
And in “When Journalists Blog,” Tidbits contributor Paul Bradshaw, senior lecturer in online journalism and magazines at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom, wrote: “Blogging journalists don’t need someone to tell them who the readers are and what they want. They already know, because the readers are on their blogs, telling them who they are and what they’re curious about. In this new blogging relationship, editors are the middlemen being cut out.”
Some of the topics raised in the latest Nieman Reports will be familiar to regular Tidbits readers. That’s fine — Nieman Reports is an academic journal as well as a journalistic one. Academic assessments often arrive more slowly but sometimes explore topics more comprehensively than the early-adopter posts we publish here. It’s encouraging to see the publication and foundation lend its authority to the digital media world that still bewilders many in the news business.
