Blurring the lines between reporters and readers

Matthew Ingram posted this great video today. It’s an inter­view with Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian. Not only does his paper have one of the best Web pres­ences of all major news­pa­pers, but the guy says some good things about the future of jour­nal­ism, espe­cially when it comes to rely­ing on the wis­dom of the crowds. They’re not new ideas, but they are well-stated ideas.


A while back, the Guardian decided to sup­ple­ment its dozen or so reg­u­lar, pro­fes­sional com­men­ta­tors with ama­teur com­men­ta­tors, about 1,000 of them. Of course, these peo­ple were only ama­teurs when it came to the field of writ­ing columns for a news­pa­per; there were experts in their respec­tive fields, judges, lawyers, doc­tors, etc.

Rusbridger refers to this as a kind of inver­sion of the tra­di­tional, top-down jour­nal­is­tic model. He explains:

“Ten years ago, we lived with this notion that we knew every­thing, that we were the fig­ures of author­ity, and we handed out the pearls of our wis­dom to the peo­ple who were lucky enough to receive them. If we can invert that, and say that the exper­tise lies out­side the news­pa­per, on so many sub­jects, [non-journalist com­men­ta­tors] actu­ally know more than we do. The moment you can get that thought into your head, you real­ize there is great trea­sure in these commentaries.”

He goes on from here to lay out the usual trap­pings of a future of jour­nal­ism inter­view. There will be a lot of jobs and news­pa­pers lost in the next 20 years. Things are chang­ing, and we have to adapt. All that jazz. I tuned back in when he referred to the cur­rent (and fail­ing) news­pa­per busi­ness model as a huge and out­dated Victorian chain of indus­try. You can cling to that model, he said, “but in the end you’ll just fall off the edge of a cliff. I’d rather that not happen.”

Rusbridger also said this, which reminded me vaguely of my master’s the­sis (which, until now, I hadn’t thought about apply­ing to journalism):

“If you can allow your­self a blur­ring of a dis­tinc­tion between the jour­nal­ist and the reader and involve the reader more because you have to acknowl­edge that they can con­tribute a lot...”

I didn’t write down the rest of the quote because it was imma­te­r­ial to the thoughts his words spawned. The dis­tinc­tion between authors and read­ers, the sub­ject of my the­sis. I need to pull that thing and wipe the dust off of its PDF cover and take a look at how I can make all that research I did for two years apply to jour­nal­ism somehow.

More to come.

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