Saturday, April 26, 2008

When the Right Hand Doesn't Know: Tech Journos Fall Behind in Conversations About New Tools, Methods

This past week I came across two conversations in the realm of tech that had me sort of wondering how some journalists miss out on conversations about what's going on within their own profession. The one that caught my attention today was Marshall Kirkpatrick's How We Use Twitter for Journalism"--which seems to focus just on what's being said among the tech folks about the uses of Twitter....who seem to be just a little removed from some of the conversations going on within their own profession on the use of Twitter....

Conversations about Twitter's application in journalism happen often in Poynter's E-Media Tidbits column. At E-MT we've been discussing not just the use of Twitter--incl. its use by the U.K. govt--but also of other tools like Zemata and CoverItLive with regularity. We Tidbits folks enjoy finding new apps and "test driving" them on a regular basis.

So, it's really a no-brainer (to those of us at E-MT anyway) that journalists might use Twitter. The questions for Twitter's use arise when it comes to local journalism, and whether or not Twitter's infrastructure can be updated fast enough so that it can keep up when there are big emergencies. Not to mention whether or not the adults in the local community have the "bandwidth" to be bothered with Twitter. (Note: yours truly often plays "devil's advocate" and is rarely one to be all rah-rah. Heck, *somebody's* got to be the slow-adopter's advocate ;-) )

The other out-of-the-loop piece came from Jim Kersteller at CNet in his praise for "citizen journalism" outing suspected Mac cloner Psyster--which then degenerated into one of those "why don't newsrooms try open-sourcing?" conversations...

Thing is, the Psyster story was broken by longtime journalist Charles Arthur in the Guardian.

Yes, it was nice that a couple of Gizmodo readers who live in Miami went to check it out, and it was very nice that CNet got 117 comments to their story on it--but the story wasn't broken by "citizen journalists"....and I'd daresay that a bunch of comments with loads of kibitzing among the crowd on their own community issues doesn't necessarily qualify as "citizen journalism"...

The thing that got me was that Kersteller seemed not to know that the journalism community's been experimenting with "open source" reporting for the past year, with Assignment Zero (which I worked on) and now with Off the Bus and Beatblogging.org among other projects that are taking place all across the country....

So, it's not like we haven't heard of "open source journalism" and it's not like it hasn't been tried--it's just that the tech journo community seems to be a little out of touch with what's going on in other parts of the wider world of journalism...

Honestly, from my vantage point--where I'm traversing journalism and tech and marketing regularly--I see where the conversations about tools are fractured and disjointed. It leaves me a sense of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing--when the right should be helping the left. How can we have any rate of adoption on tools (as well as ethics) if the disparate parts of the universe within the Internet aren't fully aware of what's going on outside of their own little bell jars? It seems, to me anyway, that we have to open the doors up on these conversations--stop just bringing in the pundits who theorize to conferences and bring in the people who are building and working with the tools. And, perhaps, we need to dampen down so much of the noise in this space and try to help folks turn up the signal. I have no idea how that could be accomplished. Noise is attractive. Noise gets pageviews. Noise gets attention. But noise doesn't always give any new information.

Noise is sometimes just shameless self-promotion...

When what's needed are better conversations outside of the bell jars...

Note: Perhaps Kirkpatrick is aware of other conversations but has to couch them in the manner acceptable to his "crowd"--yet it makes me wonder if it may be necessary for journalists to think outside their community-box in order to highlight what's happening in the wider world. Esp. as worlds converge....

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