Realtime and journalism

As a part of the Moving Images blog relay, I'm picking up from Mike Masnick at Techdirt that wrote about music and realtime, and I'm passing on to Peter Alvarsson at Headweb. But before that - a few thoughts on journalism and realtime:

A few years ago I used to work as an online journalist. I did okay, but it became very clear that I was an internet person working with journalism rather than a journalist working with the internet. It was always the internet first for me. This background may be why I think we should embrace the realtime web for journalists, even if it forces us to challenge one of professional journalism's key selling points: quality. I think it's time that we redefine it.

Quality is a highly relative term. However, in the context of journalism, it is mainly used to describe a certain type of reporting. The long form, investigative pieces. Reporting that is allowed to take time and that uses a subtle, thought through, language. The type of reporting that separates the pros from the amateurs. Make no mistake - I thoroughly enjoy this type of journalism, and I would consider it to have quality any day. But there is a time and place for everything, and quality is not always the same.

What the realtime web has done is shift the time factor. Sometime, a single tweet at the right time is perceived as having higher quality than a full length article a few hours later. The tweet may not be perfect, but under the circumstances it is good enough. It can be journalism in its own right, without having to be compared. At the same time, each situation  requires a different type of journalistic approach. In most cases, a tweet will not suffice.

What we are left with is an increasing amount of parameters that come into play when valuing journalism. The list can be made long, but a few of them could be availability, sharability, timing, convenience, correctness, language and price.

Once we start adding this complexity, the success and downfall of certain media products becomes clearer. In a realtime world, simply writing the best article may not be enough. And competition - that may not even be considered by professional journalists - can excel. For me, this is a good thing. It forces us to re-evaluate how we are doing journalism. And what type of quality is expected from each specific story.


Björn Jeffery
Bonnier R&D