Augmented Journalism

Claiming the name was one thing, publishing a couple of blogposts was a second. Dumping my whole TrueSlant-hitory on it an incomprehensible third.

In other words:

1. I claimed this platform a year and a half ago, knowing that a fusion of old fashioned journalism with modern style blogging could lead to something with “augmented value”.

2. I published a couple of maybe interesting thoughts and tried to ignite a discussion on other platforms. Which didn’t work out at all.

3. After the – most unfortunate – removal of trueslant.com (for which I was a blogger) from the Forbes-network, I had to dump my 100+ blogposts somewhere. And because I thought augmentedjournalism.com had gotten into a permanent state of sleep, I thought I might as well use this platform as a dump spot. Which I did, as you can see below…

But now I read this blogpost on owni.eu, and doubt has conquered my brain once again. It might not have been such a bad idea after all. So what now? Revamp this thing? Give it away? Invite owni-staff on it? Get active again? Or just fall asleep for ever?

Just tell me.

“A lot of people have been trying to figure out the difference between bloggers and journalist. There seems to be a feeling among some that bloggers are less important than journalist. Others feel journalists are behind the times…

(…)

In reality, nothing stops a blogger from being a journalist and vice versa – it’s just a matter of semantics.

(…)

If we began defining a blogger as someone that writes a blog, then we can state that a journalist is someone that keeps a journal.

(…)

Well what is the point? To me, when I see everything laid out the only distinction I see between journalist and blogger is that one is exclusively online.”

The Difference Between Bloggers and Journalists.

What’s the future in Print Journalism? Tough question for newspaper people, but even tougher for a J-student whose ambitions now seem to vanish rapidly into thin air.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from one of them. Her main question: will my education ever bring me a job? I tweeted her desperate cry for help,  soon to find out that it struck a lot of people. I immediately received tens of replies, first asking what I had answered her and afterwards offering help and giving advise.

So I decided to offer an – anonymous – reprint of her mail on my weblog, together with my answer. In translation:

Dear Bart Brouwers,

I am a student at the Utrecht School of Journalism.

I’m doing an article on the future of newspaper journalism. Our school still offers newspaper journalism as a major, but other journalism schools don’t anymore. And even here just a few students have chosen newspaper journalism.

The reason? In short, we see no future in it. The announced downsizing at national newspapers de Volkskrant and Trouw, has strengthened that feeling.

I read your article last week in newspaper Trouw in which you say that the 60 young print journalists that will be sponsored by the state, could better be sent to the new online media.

Now I wonder, and with me many journalism students, in a few years when we graduate, will there still be a future career in print media? Or should we orientate on these new online initiatives you are talking about?

Sincerely, X

My answer:

That’s a tough question. In fact, you ask me if you had better quit your school or if there is still a small chance for you, some place out there in the newspaper industry…

A question that’s hard to answer by mail – the nuances are too numerous. Even if I tell you I am certain that the future of journalism will be online. For now I have two thoughts though:

1. in general: as long as you are willing to use your important skills in journalism as a basis for your work, you could turn out very well, even if that would not be in newspaper journalism istelf. As for any journalist: you always have to be flexible and entrepreneurial, so you can always adapt to new situations.

2. More specifically: wouldn’t it be nice for you to organize a small symposium at your school where students can meet with experienced journalists and newspaper managers? You let them do some brief introductions and then all enter a debate about employment opportunities and the role that both you and the industry itself can play.

Note: I would of course be happy to participate.

We exchanged a couple more mails and now she is trying to pursuade school into having her organize this symposium. Which is great. The fact that this girl not only sent me her questions, but also immediately grabs the opportunities that came along, proves that she will be allright in the long run.

Which ofcourse unfortunately doesn’t apply for all of her colleagues in the newspaper business.

Jeff Jarvis knows. But didn’t we already say this at the start of True/Slant?

The future of news is entrepreneurial « BuzzMachine.

“Journalism is a 20th century activity, it’s out of energy and pretty much finished. Newspapers are lost, there is no interaction what so ever with the audience.” Andrew Keen, author of much discussed ‘The Cult of the Amateur’, is straightforward in his judgements. Making friends is not his foremost obsession, you could say. Always polemic, always questioning common sense.

Not too often Keen expresses regrets about what he did or said. But there is one thing he surely feels sorry for: the subtitle of his book: How the internet kills our culture. “I didn’t invent that phrase, but then again, I agreed with it. And of course it is not accurate. It’s not the internet that’s killing our culture, we are. The internet is nothing more than an instrument.”

The Cult of the Amateur is agonistic and challenging. “Now I’m working on a new book, which will be more balanced. It’s called ‘The Digital Vertigo‘, a cultural critique on the social networking revolution.” Does that mean that the style of his first book was a mistake? “No, not at all. If I had written that book in the ‘on the one hand this and on the other hand that’-kind-of-way, it would never have received the attention it got now. So it was worthwile.”

This is the Andrew Keen we have learned to know. The antichrist of Silicon Valley knows how to sell the brand Andrew Keen. Look at his website and the video (see below) he produced to draw attention to his activities: they are both instruments in expanding his audience. Which is – don’t get me wrong – nothing to be shy or reserved about, but the marketeer in Andrew Keen is just a little bit more, uhm, obvious than in most of his colleagues. The interview I asked for on the occasion of the speech he is going to give in Tilburg next friday, is another example. It was planned to be held right after his performance, so I could include all the specific topics he would mention there. But Keen strongly suggested we’d do it before, so it could be helpful in drawing some extra guests. Keen is 100% honest in this strategy: “I wouldn’t talk with you if there was nothing to win for me. Interviews help me sell books.”

[youtubevid id="ykETC1u0a5g"]

Blogging and twittering do, too. “I don’t blog because I like it. In fact, I don’t. There’s no pleasure in it for me, nor do I look at it as a form of charity. Giving your thoughts away for free, because that’s what blogging is, is not much of a business model either. A writer doesn’t make money on the internet. I just do it because it helps me sell books and build an audience that wants to hear me speech.”

Keen thinks more people should look at it like this. “The problem with the internet is that it ridicules the idea of intellectual property. I’m not happy about that, but it’s a reality so you had better cope with it. The internet has brought us an abundance of reproduced content and a scarcity of attention. That’s really cruel for artists and writers. The good news is that this increases the value of physical products like books or live performances. That’s where the business model is shifting towards.”

It would be rewarding, Keen says, for journalists to get to understand these new circumstances too. “For example by accepting that your content can and will be reproduced by others, if it is worthwhile of course. You can like it or not, the internet has enabled it so people will do it. A good journalist gets a new focus: by sharing his thoughts as much as he can and earning his money, like I do, with books and speeches.”

Twitter is very useful too for that purpose, Keen found out. “I use it like I blog, as a broadcasting medium. Twitter to me is not a conversation, I just want more people to know me and get interested in my books.” A lot of what you see on twitter means nothing, Keen says. “But at the same time you know there is a lot of  useful information. It would be great if we would find a way to curate this stream, to manage it. We used to have newspapers to channel the avalanche of information so we wouldn’t have to do that ourselves. Today’s challenge is to find a new method and new business models to do that.”

NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press is distributing a photo of a Marine fatally wounded in battle, choosing after a period of reflection to make public an image that conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it. (…) “AP journalists document world events every day. Afghanistan is no exception. We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is,” said Santiago Lyon, the director of photography for AP.

via Captured Photos. (includes AP-photos)

Journalism has to reinvent itself. It sounds almost like a mantra, not only because it is practically the only thing new bloggers and old journalists agree upon. Journalism has to reinvent itself. Indeed, it has to. But up to now, that’s where the common understanding stops. Heavily disputed are questions like how, when, in what, and even why.

If you look at the best qualities of the blogosphere and those of the world of the classical newspapers, then one thing is sure: combined they would be able to restore the reputation of journalism. But then again, you only have to read Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine to know just how divided both worlds actually are.

The world has known the concept of augmented intelligence since the 1960’s, recently we all discovered augmented reality, what we now need is Augmented Journalism.

So let’s take the strong investigative roots, in depth reporting and power of the facts from the old world, and combine it with the transparancy, interaction, speed and connectivity of the new one. And moreover, let’s finally place the involved, knowing and interested audience on a pedestal and work together for even better results. Augmented Journalism is where bloggers and reporters meet and society can benefit from the best practices of the two of them.

Augmented Journalism is all about a stronger relationship between journalists and their audience. Journalists must stop being the all-objective ivory tower bystanders who bring the facts as they occur and who give (or don’t, if they are not willing to) an incident the label “news”. Journalists – as bloggers have understood – should be part of society and open for the input of participating members of society. They should stop regarding themselves as the only true gatekeepers of the news & opinion business, and start giving the context needed to keep society rolling. In short, professionals and amateurs can come toegether in the process of journalism, but only if both can adopt a new attitude. In the end, Augmented Journalism shall be rewarding and might even be a way to get the business back in journalism.

The plan is to write a book on Augmented Journalism, and give the visitors of True/Slant an active part in it. True/Slant is offering its audience – being journalists, bloggers or none of both – to participate in the very process of writing: framing the playing field, improving the thoughts and all together reaching a sustainable definition of Augmented Journalism.  It will hopefully result in a book that is built upon the knowledge of many and in that way will be the first proof of Augmented Journalism’s power.

True/Slant’s subtitle is saying: “News is more than what happens“. Augmented Journalism is too.

UPDATE: see also augmentedjournalism.com