Journalism is dead. Long live journalism!
IT’S rather fashionable at the moment for critics to sound the death knell for us “traditional journalists”.
You old dinosaurs, they say, are heading straight to the tar-soaked pit to finally become the fossils we supposedly are.
Are we the last generation of hacks, us with ink in our blood and paper on which to scribble?
So say the soothsayers, rubbing their hands in unseemly glee as they point to the rise of bloggers, citizen journalists and an age of near zero-cost publishing which will make us all redundant.
Ahem, I beg to differ even though I am a champion of new technologies and new ways of journalism (in fact, my team and I have won awards for it).
However, I also believe that what we do, how we do it, and – heretical as it is – even how we communicate it today still has plenty of road to run before we’re done – especially here in South Africa.
Broken Homes and other things
Boy, I've been trying to get a post up for the last week but have been so busy I haven't had a moment to blog, but now I do. Hooray.
Broken Homes - our online project
I've been wanting to write about our Broken Homes series which we started last week and which was our second attempt at a proper online/print investigation or special report. We ran a substantial number of stories in print but the online package (really a mini-site in its own right) was approached separately.
Since the end of last year we have been having a discussion in the Dispatch newsroom about what the journalism of tomorrow will look like. I have spent many nights reading and thinking about this - as you can read on some of my other blog posts. I feel we need to find a style of online journalism which exploits the medium on which it will be presented. I do not want us to fall into the trap of seeing online as a "value-add" to traditional journalism.
Scridb filterThe hardest day
Today was a very hard day when I had to speak to my staff about some extremely difficult news concerning our paper. The fortitude and support for each other and even for me as we spoke about what looms ahead was humbling. I am enormously proud of them all, for what it's worth.
This is my leader for tomorrow's paper which will explain something to our readers about what is happening here.
THERE is no sugar-coating the reality we find ourselves confronted with today. We live in bleak times.
Globally, the world faces a recession which experts say could be the worst since the Second World War.
South Africa is not untouched by the meltdown we are witnessing as hundreds of thousands of jobs around the world are shed.
In the Eastern Cape hard times lie ahead. In East London, the city’s largest private sector employer, Mercedes Benz, announced this week a process which could lead to significant job losses.
Alas, at the Dispatch, yesterday we also announced a similar process to our staff. Our newspaper is struggling, like many other businesses, with many challenges as consumer spending declines along with associated advertising spending.
The year ahead
Well, I've been in the new job as editor for an official two days now although I've been acting ed for the last two months. Time to take a breather and share some thoughts with our readers.
I hosted a strategy session to map out our plans for the next 18 months and here are some clues (without giving away too much) as to what to expect from us over the next year.
1. Local news - more than ever before with a strong emphasis on campaigns
2. An interesting and - I hope - unique election campaign coverage plan
3. An approach to online reporting which I think will be a first in SA
4. A couple of computer-aided reporting experiments which I hope will be fun and fascinating.
More on all of this as our plans - and budget approval - unfolds. It's going to be a tough year on many fronts but we've got a strong team to pull us through the storm.
PS this post was written on my new blackberry so please forgive any typos I didn't spot 
What is online journalism?
What is online journalism? This may seem like a strange question coming from a person who is part of a team which won SA's inaugural Vodacom online journalism award. But you know what they say about complacency and how it breeds faliure etc... So we need to raise our bar.
This is a question that I have been thinking a lot about over the last year or so as we have thrown ourselves here at the Dispatch into online publishing.
I hope over time to be able to contribute to the answer to this question as we continue our online voyage of discovery.
First up, let me say what I don't think online journalism is:
1. It's not about providing video clips that augment print stories or adding a bit of visual sparkle to traditional ink-and-paper reporting;
2. It's not about multimedia packages either. That's called broadcasting - and I don't think it's particularly new or engaging in the online medium.
3. It's not about blogging either - that simply accelerates the traditional interaction which has always existed between audience and journalist, all that is new about it is the immediacy of the interaction.
4. It's not about providing source documentation online for readers to consume and evaulate the quality of your reporting. While I think this is an enormously beneficial resouce I don't think it is journalism - it is simply an information dump.
If you have read the collection that we won our online award for you will see it comprises all these elements. And I don't think we have defined "online journalism" in it - we did okay by the current definition of what journalism in this medium is about but we need to go further.
The challenge I have set for myself and my team is for us over the next year to really explore what online journalism is about.
Here are my thoughts on what I would like to see us explore and I don't know if they are right or wrong.
1. The medium needs to become part of the message, (Thanks, Mr McLuhan);
2. We need to find a narrative style of story-telling that is true to good story-telling (plot, character, motivation, resolution) but where we can amplify these elements using the power of the medium we now work in;
3. Journalists need to surrender ego - we need to provide knowledge tools that allow our audience to interrogate information and find understanding in it that we do not see. I see databases and the "wisdom of the crowd" as powerful online journalistic tools. Reporters need to also be innovators of information technology to provide real meaning to the results of these tools;
4. Journalism needs to become about "why" and not "what" - the "what" is commonly known, the value lies in the "why". I think this is true to print journalism but online journalism gives us a powerful tool to answer this question;
I would love your thoughts on this as we try and answer these questions.
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