Journalism 2.0: An Overview

Journalism is still about people, not technology. Technology is changing how we're reaching people, but it doesn't change that we're trying to reach people to tell them stories that are interesting, relevant and useful to their lives.

We need to change how we do journalism to adapt to how and when people get their news, but we are NOT changing our values.

In many ways, today has never been a better time to be a journalist. In the history of civilization, people have never consumed as much information as they do today, and in so many different ways, like:

-- Print.

-- Traditional broadcast (TV, radio).

-- New broadcast (cable and satellite TV, on-demand TV, satellite radio).

--  Online (news Web sites, blogs, aggregators, social media, ect.).

-- Mobile (smart phones, tablets).

-- The next big thing on the horizon, whatever it may be.

Likewise, there has never been a time that offered so many powerful ways to tell stories and serve the audience.

Journalists can reach the audience in a multitude of ways, no longer being limited to a single specialty medium. The Web means there are no more constraints based on time and space. Whenever you get the story, you can share the story, and in endless ways. No more solely having to wait for the start of a printing press or for an 11 o'clock broadcast time.

No longer are we pure media companies sticking to a single medium. We are information technology companies producing content across many mediums.

That means mastering fundamental skills that have not changed. Story-telling, gathering and organizing information is still critical; so is affirming accuracy and focusing on what is most relevant, interesting and useful to your audience. The only difference is, we do that across many mediums, and not just one.

We will use traditional print concepts as a foundation on which we will build your skills and expertise in telling stories in many ways: in print; in breaking news stories for a Web audience; with video; and with real-time social media tools like Twitter.

And we will experiment with these techniques in inventing our own multimedia approaches to story-telling. Think of the technology you use as information consumers: to get news and information, how do you use social media? Or multimedia? Or mobile? Then, let's apply those habits to how we tell stories.

We will learn all this by doing. We will put these skills into action almost immediately. Then, we will review what we did and apply those lessons going forward.

The pace has to be fast, and there's no time to waste. As Journalism 2.0 says; The fact is, if you work in journalism, you work for an online news organization --- whether you want to or not. Change is inevitable. Progress is optional. The future is now.

Now, let's go evolve journalism.