the value-add of Journalism

I just read an article about how Facebook and Wikipedia are better information sources during emergencies (hat tip David Cohn), and it gets me back to something that's on many peoples minds.

What is the value of the Journalist in this world of free-flowing information?

I've been saying for a while that I don't believe that newspapers can compete on timeliness with the combination of wire-services and social media (blogging, twittering, facebook, etc).

For news-as-it-happens, short snippets of information - no matter how badly formatted, how terribly worded, or sometimes even how one-sided - are still extremely valuable. Non-text media (audio/video/pictures) is even more powerful for breaking news (it may be biased, but it's at least more believable).

As I stated here (see the comments),

Gathering 'voices from the crowd' has always been an important part of journalism, and the tools available today make that increasingly easy to do. Blogging tools allow for easy digital expression, and all of the aggregating tools out there make it easy to collect those voices together.

But journalism is also about more than that.

Over the past few months of talking to people in the news industry, I've heard this insistence that the only way to compete is to move to a 24/7 newsroom in which things are posted as soon as they happen. I think that's a mistake.

Underlying that thinking is the legacy of the legacy newsroom. Newspapers have always been vertically integrated as distributer, printer, publisher, newsgatherer, news synthesizer, aggregator, marketplace, and community - and they are still trying to be all of the above.

Instead, I think newsrooms need to start recognizing that each of those roles are distinct. In the face of shrinking newsrooms, they have to pick and choose which of those roles they perform better than anyone else in the world.

Newspapers aren't the best marketplace - craigslist is.
Newspapers aren't the best community - facebook might be.
Newspapers aren't the best aggregators - google news may be.

So where does that leave newspapers?

I still think that their best asset is their journalists and their editors. The casual layperson like me may blog our opinions, and we may blog about something happening down the street. But I'm never going to go through the trouble of interviewing people to find out what they think, feel, saw, or heard. And I'm not going to go dig through public papertrails or datasets to find the hidden truths. And I'm terrible at citing my sources. And, in case you haven't noticed, I'm a third-rate editor.

So getting back to where I started. I think social media has given journalists one more mechanism for sampling the public - it's a supplement to going out and interviewing people. And I think that's all that it is.

I will still rely on journalists to synthesize all of that noise into something cohesive, and for editors to help organize that into a meaningful (albeit incomplete) view of the world.