iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.
Here come my notes for session VI.
Round Table: Round Table: Journalism on the Net
Chairs: Julio Rodríguez de la Plata
Are we creating/entering the Global Village?
Fernando Jáuregui
(New) Social Networks challenge the traditional way people is informed. Journals (and media in general) have to shape their discourse to this new reality. Hence, digital journalism is not geek stuff, but a “legal revolution”, a habits revolution, etc. to cope with this new civilization. We have to “naturalize” the new information needs and the solutions to meet these needs.
Requisites for the mainstreaming of digital journalism:
- End of anonymity: opinion has to be signed by real people.
- Interactivity.
- End of piracy and non-attribution of content, from both sides: mainstream journals have to cite citizen journalists, and citizen journalists have to cite their mainstream sources.
- Not everything is information, not everything is news: impact, for the sake of it, is not good. And the way (real) information is published also matters.
- Ads are not confidential information: this is misleading the reader.
Blogs are journalism, but are not media. Media require some infrastructure behind, some resources. Media are professionals and earn their living this way, these two issues do make a difference.
Ignacio Escolar
It is an error not thinking of digital journalism as the journalism of the future… as it is an error not realizing that paper journalism is the journalism of the present.
Liability on the comments published in a digital journal is neither “letters to the director” not “something I’ve nothing to do with it”. We have to learn how to deal with these comments… especially when they’re anonymous.
The quest for economic sustainability determines some behaviors of some digital papers. And, somehow, the democratization of media makes them less profitable.
Competition in the digital arena is way bigger than competition in the paper arena: the digital reader can choose from within (literally) billions of websites. Paper journals do not face this landscape.
Manuel M. Almeida
There is a lot of people that want to turn communication into journalism in opposition to traditional or mainstream journalism (this could be called Communication 3.0). But communication is not necessarily journalism. We’re maybe talking about citizen communication, not citizen journalism.
Interaction between citizen communication and mainstream journalism is a must. Hence, it is somehow a necessary but sometimes absurd debate the fight between both positions, one against the other.
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