Fred Wilson’s post this morning would cause an epidemic of cardiac arrest at a newspaper or journalism school. It comes in response to an argument about whether blogs can innately be journalism while Twitter and MySpace can’t (Fred and I each disagree with that assertion; in my mind, they are just tools that can be used as journalism but often aren’t). Says Fred:
I think journalism itself is a dated concept. We are now in the world of conversation. We are talking to ourselves. John Heilemann said it best in his recent column in NY Magazine about Murdoch’s designs on the WSJ:
“Did anybody at Dow Jones ever contemplate purchasing MySpace? Did Arthur Sulzberger or Don Graham? I don’t know, but I’d wager they didn’t even know what MySpace was. The obvious retort is, Why should they have? What does social networking have to do with journalism? And, no doubt, a precise answer is hard to conjure. But if you don’t believe that the intermingling of these spheres will be central to how future generations consume their news, you’ve apparently been sleeping–and clearly don’t have kids.”
The intermingling of these spheres will be HOW future generations consume their news. [And create it – ed] Period. End of story. I learn stuff on Twitter every day that is more profound than many of the blogs I read.Just because it’s said in 140 characters or less doesn’t mean it’s not journalism. To think otherwise is patronizing and wrong.
The tool doesn’t define journalism any more than the person does. The information and the need for it defines journalism.
