Journalism 2.0: Putting It All Together

Our task is, according to the Journalism 2.0 text, to serve people in our community by telling them useful and entertaining stories through whatever technology they want to use.

There are many new ways to serve the audience, like new writing styles (like blogs), and non-linear story-telling methods (like interactive online stories). Conversations between media and the public is no longer one-way like a lecture; it's a two-way conversation empowered by the Web in general and social media in particular.

There is no excuse for not learning how to tell stories in ALL mediums, and continuing to evolve mediums for story-telling purposes. That is true whether we work in print or TV or radio or magazines, or even online.

(The Detroit Free Press has Web videos. ESPN has a magazine. NPR has a Web site. People don't go to the Free Press for something to read or ESPN for something to watch or NPR for something to listen to; rather, they go to those news sources for news, regardless of the medium.)

The era of the single-tool journalist is over. We must be proficient in all mediums. Newspapers are hiring people who can do videos and blogs. Blogs and Web sites are hiring people who can do traditional long-form writing. (Over the past few years, CNN has hired a number of former State Newsers to do print-style stories for their Web site, for example.) The inability for us to master multiple mediums will make us less desirable to employers.

To get better, we should practice for fun. Play with new mediums, especially ones that we use as consumers, or that your friends use. Find ways to create content that fits those mediums, and the content people want in those mediums.

(For example, by playing with Twitter we know that it works well with telling a breaking news story as it happens, and blow-by-blow. With a deeper, more in-depth story, not so much.)

Plus, look for examples of the type of mediums and content you're playing around with. Once we start playing with a new medium, it will be easier for us to identify things that we like or don't like as practiced by others using the same medium.

(It took The State News probably two years of experimenting with Twitter before it found formulas for using Twitter that the audience found useful and engaging, and journalists found as good ways to break and broadcast stories.)

The goal isn't to produce multimedia just to produce multimedia; it's to produce multimedia that is as interesting, relevant, useful, and of the same quality as more traditional news products.