People who hung out in Table Talk in its early days remember the presence of Jay Rosen, who encouraged us to think about tightening the relationship between the journalism we were doing in Salon magazine and the discussions that were taking place on our boards. For various reasons we never really got there. Rosen moved on to other things too (he’s chairman of NYU’s Journalism Dept.). But he recently sent me a link to an article he wrote for Columbia Journalism Review that continues the discussion and is well worth reading.
Rosen is interested in how the online medium continues to break down the lines of authority in traditional journalism, using the two examples of the recent New York Times meltdown and Chris Allbritton’s reader-sponsored reporting from Iraq. The one thing I’d say is that these examples are at extreme ends of a spectrum, and though such outliers make the most dramatic contrast, they rarely point the way to the future. Only a handful of journalistic institutions have the Times’ reputation, and only a handful of bloggers (I believe) are ever going to be commissioned by their readers the way Allbritton was. What will be more interesting, I think, is to see how the rise of expert bloggers begins to eat away at the edges of trade journalism (as it already has), and local journalism, and other areas where the pros, today, often fall down on the job — or the institutional structures that should support professional journalism no longer bear weight.
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