The New Journalism?

Seems that the advent of blogs and, next, vlogs is causing some head-scratching in journalism schools, Here’s a piece from Adam Pendenberg at Wired with some interesting thoughts.

Should we raze our curriculum to the ground and start over, perhaps,
and look to the web for inspiration? Could it be beneficial to jettison
"objectivity" and "balance" in favor of transparent bias, much like
bloggers (and online columnists) do? Would it be wise to encourage our
students to exchange fact-based narrative for edgy commentary and
digital trash talk? And if we were to banish the inverted pyramid to
the scrapheap of history, what could we replace it with?

Yes, it’s true that newspapers are steadily losing readers and that
younger people will undoubtedly choose the web. Ultimately, the printed
word will die off. Not tomorrow or the next day, but in the coming
decades. It’s inevitable since it will be more cost-effective (not to
mention better for the environment) to distribute news over the web and
via cell phones and PDAs than by printing it on paper and relying on
trucks to deliver it to newsstands and subscribers’ doorsteps.

But Pendenberg concludes that newspapers are not dying off, but that it’s printed news in its rigid format that is going out. He says newspaper companies as news sources are still doing fine and that new forms of communicating news are needed.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t harness the power of the digital medium. I assigned blogs
to my graduate students this past semester so they could cover a
business beat. Other professors have also jumped fingers-first into
digital journalism, most notably Jay Rosen, founder of the media blog PressThink.