Hoo boy

I’ve been saying that the publishers I know in Europe are ahead of lots of people here. Guess it’s just the ones I’m lucky enough to know. Martin Stabe links to a dinosaur’s roar from Helmut Heinen, president of the German Newspaper Publishers Association. If I’m getting this right (standard translation caveat for me), he said that web 2.0 content is not journalism. He said that newspapers should use blogs, wikis, and such to reach the public, but that content produced by the public is not journalism. He called “citizen journalism” a fraudulent label. Journalism, he argued, can be done only by talented and well-trained professional journalists and he complained about the cost of making news — the old way, at least. He even criticized media for publishing mobile-phone photos and video readers send in. He fears that this turns “so-called lay reporters or reader-reporters into a collective Paparazzitum.”