Journalism 2.0

Journalists have already learned the most important thing from bloggers: news can be a conversation, not just a lecture. And recent research is showing that journalists are extensively using social media, which allows feedback, comments, multimedia and more. There is an opportunity for a dialogue—an interaction—rather than a one-sided monologue, and journalists know and utilize these aspects of social media.

However, with more than 100 million blogs floating around in the blogosphere, it’s difficult for many journalists—and bloggers for that matter—to catch the interest of readers and engage them in conversations. Some people are going as far as saying that blogging is dead.

So what does this mean for traditional media? If bloggers die, do journalists live?

Well, bloggers aren’t dead, and neither are journalists. In fact, the only thing that seems to be dying is the average reader’s attention span. Technology has shoved well-crafted inverted pyramids into shorter blog posts and now it’s reducing information into 140 words or less via Twitter. At this rate, we might as well be communicating in acronyms.

The Web is constantly changing and facilitating rapid technological and social change. And this is exactly the lesson to be learned. New social media tools will pop-up and there will always be new ways to communicate information and news. Traditional media should monitor and implement these useful social media tools to retain existing audiences and invite new ones, but they don’t need to go overboard.

The single most important thing that traditional media should do is to keep doing what they do best. It’s as simple as that. They’re masters of their crafts and have been doing it for so long; traditional media obviously provides its audiences with something that new media cannot, otherwise there would be no traditional media still existing today.