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ernoldińo, via Flickr (CC license)
Bloggers, journalists... Can't we all just get along? |
On Aug. 9,
Steve Safran of the Lost Remote blog (which covers the TV and online news business) published a thoughtful essay bemoaning lazy session planning at journalism conferences:
How "vs." thinking drags everyone down.
There, he wrote: "Television vs. newspapers. Blogs vs. news. The Web vs. print. VJs vs. photographers. You can find tons of 'vs.' at every journalism conference, in every media boardroom, and indeed on every media blog. The 'vs.' supposes that there are two choices, and it is the notion that we need a 'vs.' that is one of the biggest reasons why traditional media and new media aren't performing nearly as well as they could.
"...The more tools we keep giving journalism, the more journalists keep arguing over the tools. What they don't see is the toolbox.
"I am always amazed by how any journalism discussion can be ended with the following pronouncement: 'That's not news.' Not 'I think we should devote our resources to something else' or 'Our audience has been favoring a different story.' The people who say 'That's not news' are the editorial 'vs.' thinkers who stop sites from gathering the great voices from the blogs in their communities. They refuse to let their own reporters blog. They hear the very word 'blog' for that matter and think 'That's not news.' They believe it is 'journalism vs. the mob.' And in no other business that I know of could you get away with holding your customers in such contempt. OK, maybe the airlines."
Following up on this theme, today Safran highlighted a prime example of "vs. thinking" at a recent journalism conference -- last week's Online Publishers Association Global Forum in London, where blogger and journalist Jeff Jarvis debated Martin Nisenholtz, senior VP of digital operations for the New York Times Company.
Rafat Ali of PaidContent captured the debate with his cell phone as he sat behind the panelists. Here's the video. (Of this, media blogger Howard Owens observed, "It is camera phone journalism. The audio is clear and the picture clear enough. It gets the job done. [Shouldn't all reporters] carry a device like this?")
Safran noted, "Jarvis put it well in response to an audience member's point that newspapers do the legwork and bloggers only comment: 'All I can say is that I look forward to a conference where we don't have this argument and we talk about the possibilities of what we can do together.'"
Amen.
Personally, I intend join Safran's "vs. thinking watch" by noting whenever I see such needlessly adversarial setups appearing in the agendas of journalism events or in other public discussions about the field. Framing issues constructively and moving forward is much more fun -- and more useful -- than bickering and defensiveness, I think.
What other examples of "vs. thinking" have you seen lately at journalism events or public discussions of the field? What did you think of it? Please coment below.
