March 8, 2008

Journalism, New and Old

A couple of stories about journalism caught my eye this morning, including this from PR Week:

In the run-up to last month's Washington State presidential primaries, 16 young journalists covered the campaign events of nearly every Presidential contender to visit the state. However, the aspiring reporters and editors weren't reporting on deadline in the traditional sense. The group of bloggers are University of Washington students in professor David Domke's online journalism class, which teaches Web reporting, blogging, and the use of multimedia applications, along with proper sourcing and the inverted pyramid writing style.

The classes of 2008 and beyond, many familiar with the Web for a decade or more, are being taught to adjust to the quickening pace required for real-world reporting. And much of that instruction is coming from this year's campaign, where deadlines are often pushed forward to just after, or during, an event or speech, says Domke.

"Everything is lightning-fast these days, and this has been the biggest adjustment for my students, since they're used to reading about [events], but they haven't stepped into the very fast current of the coverage," he says. "I think when we started this class, some of them didn't have much experience blogging. Then they started seeing how they would write things and it would get picked up [by other blogs or news Web sites]."

The course is another example of future journalists - and the people who train them - adjusting to a media map where bloggers hold as many post-graduation opportunities as traditional media sources. Reporters are not only trafficking in the written word, but manning digital cameras and audio recorders...

Yesterday, The New York Times asked what the publishing industry - and the paper itself - could have done to have fact-checked a fradulent story produced by Margaret Seltzer that made its way into a book, and to the pages of the paper itself in a profile.

Just as the creator of those fake "National Guard documents" fooled the fact-checkers at CBS four years ago, leading to a false and fraudulent story making it on to 60 Minutes, while the much-broader fact-checking capacity of the blogosphere spotted the errors and exposed the fraud.