Paul Bradshaw does a good job of explaining how journalism differs in a distributed world. Here’s a vodcast (video podcast) in which he explains what he’s talking about by “distributed journalism”:
UPDATE: I embedded the wrong video, now I can’t find a way to embed the right video. Here’s a link. Go listen to it NOW!
Now, the question is: Do you have someone on staff who is pushing your content out to social media sites? Is there a “Facebook editor” or a “YouTube” monitor, or a Digg editor? If not, why not?The key is not that this is going to garner a huge traffic boost for your college media site (it might), but that these types of tools will give your students greater “employability” in the future. What you learn in school doesn’t necessarily mean instant gratification, but can definitely help with a skill set that will be useful going forward.
on May 16th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Fantastic post, Paul provides very meaningful insight on the issue facing traditional news outlets operating today.
on May 21st, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Oddly enough, I’ve just been asked to do that very job at The Nevada Sagebrush. I’m a big fan of Outing, I used him in a comprehensive paper on social-networked news.
However, the social networking editor or whatever you want to call it, should be spending less time pushing content to these locations and spend more time creating that content on his/her own web site. Then networking it with your community, forcing them to come to your site to view that content rather than someone else’s site.