We've been very quiet when it comes to describing exactly what reporterist is. So I thought I'd take some time to talk about our thoughts on journalism, and where reporterist fits into that picture. I'll try to do this in small chunks over the next few posts.
Your comments are most definitely welcome.
Great News
When I think about what has traditionally made people follow a particular news publication, I think of three aspects:
- Reporting: Probably the first, and most obvious thing is the quality of the reporting itself. Timeliness, perspective, objectivity, thoroughness... all of things that make for a good story and increase the trustworthiness of a news brand.
- Selection: Slightly more subtle is the selection of news. We look to great news organizations to tell us what's important in the world. Sometimes it's like taking medicine. For example, I may not really be interested in all the stories in a given issue of The Economist, but I will read at least the first few paragraphs of each story - and usually try to read it cover-to-cover just because I have entrusted that the editors at The Economist to tell me what important things happened in the world this week - for some definition of important.
- Editorial: I know many people that get the paper only to read the editorial pages. Those regular, 'expert' opinions, were once only available in the opinion sections of newspapers.
So how has that changed?
- Editorial: Probably the most obvious change that has been talked about to death, is the ability for anyone to have a soapbox to stand on. I'm standing on mine right now. And so is every other blogger out there. For almost a decade now, but most definitely in the past five years, newspapers no longer determine who gets up on their soapbox. I could go on and elaborate; but you know the drill. The topic of blogs and democratized publishing has been discussed to death over the past five years so I'm not going to elaborate.
- Selection: There has been no lack of buzz around the topic of selection, either. As information becomes abundant, we need ways to make sense of an filter it. There are many approaches to this:
- Traditional, human powered: There's nothing wrong with having human editors. Most people still rely on human editors to tell them what's important. That's a big part of what newspapers and magazines are selling you.
- Populist: "Read what everyone else is reading." digg comes to mind immediately. Most news sites now have a 'most emailed' and 'most viewed' list of articles that approximates the same thing. I'm assuming that Google factors this into the stories shown on their page.
- Social: "Read what other people read". Slightly different than reading what everyone reads, is some subset of that. This includes awesome social bookmarking sites like faves, the link sharing features of sites like facebook and, don't forget, just sending your friends a link in email.
- Categorization: Whether it's by tagging (del.icio.us) or topic search another way of selecting what to read is by looking for particular topics.
- Recommendations: Findory was an awesome news site, started by an ex-amazonian, that used a "people who read this also liked to read..." approach to news.
There are undoubtedly others that I haven't mentioned - the point is that there are many really smart people trying to figure out new ways of helping people sift through the vast sea of content out there. - Reporting: There are some great new initiatives in reporting. User Generated Content is another buzz-phrase that most people are sick of hearing. But there's oh my news, CNN ireport, msnbc's FirstPerson and all of the examples of citizen journalism during and after the Virginia Tech massacre, the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and hurricane Katrina.
But I still believe that there is still not enough emphasis placed on actual reporting.
Citizen Journalism has been an awesome source of information during times of crisis, when amassing community support around issues, or in specific areas such as technology.
But most blogs out there are still reactions, commentary, and discussion based on stories that are reported by traditional media and wire services.
