Out With A Bang

The fact that a mate of Mr Shirky could be found singing off the same hymn sheet as the master shouldn’t, I guess, come as any great surprise.

But this post by his pal Nick still has considerable merit – particularly if the thoughts therein start to lodge in the minds of the Columbia J-School kids as they leave the collegiate womb and head for the big, bad world out there.

A world right now – certainly for any J-School kid with ambitions of being the next Woodward or Bernstein – that is bigger and badder than most in living memory.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/05/guest-post-of-sorts-nicholas-lemann-at-columbia-journalism-school-graduation/

There are some great lines therein; areas that we have touched on before – not least Shane Richmond’s aside on the night of our ‘VIP Club’ gathering that, maybe, we as journalists weren’t that special after all; that we weren’t some breed apart… that the advance of technology had rendered much of our uniqueness redundant.

Who needs a secret langauage to scribble on a note-pad when you’ve got a mobile phone?

But I can do 120 words a minute… Er, so..? I’ve got an iPhone.

I still whole-heartedly think that journalists are special people; that not ‘everybody’ can do our job – whether or not they have now got the ‘tools’ to do our job. Everyone can be a publisher, not everyone can be a journalist… For that you need regular access to a near-private conversation…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=53

We just need to re-focus our core skill set in a different direction – that the conversations we spark, nurture and join have to be just as much with advertisers as they continue to be with teenage footballers, parish council chairmen and all the rest of our traditional ilk.

Particularly at that hyper-local and hyper-niche level. We make our innate personability pay.

Because the only people who are going to ride to our potentially part-time rescue are, funnily enough, ourselves.

And how we converse with what was once our audience is going to be one of the keys to our future. Because we cannot afford to butt in; insist that we are the only opinion that counts; demand to be listened to. When and how we demand.

Nor can we afford to impose a walled garden on them and charge them for the right to listen to our conversation.

The web does not do imposition. End of. Period.

Do not impose a solution on me… I’ll find my own. I’m empowered; no longer am I enfeebled. Don’t build a wall in front of me. Cos I’ll knock it down…

All such thoughts lie at the heart of this line…

‘We felt that our own judgments about what good journalism was, achieved after a lot of argument, should be accepted by the rest of the world…’

That we were the only ones who thought about such matters; and wrote about them with an eloquence and a clarity others could only dream of… we were dishing out our tablets of stone from aloft in our ivory towers… and, in so doing, we lost touch with our audience.

They moved on without us.

‘But this is no longer a good way of defining how we should conduct public conversation, when, so to speak, we are outside the family circle…’

The ‘family’ are already finding their own solutions to communicating on the web; solutions that all-too often do not fit with the answers that we – or rather MSM-stroke-BigMedia – are trying to impose on them from above.

Top down, top down, top down… all the time.

When the reality is that the answers that actually suit what was once our audience are coming from the bottom up; street level Twitter conversations that ‘fit’ with my need for news on the go; that’s news that matters to me… and stop telling me what the news is that matters to me… and if it is the ‘news’ that my dog’s been found, fine.

On that day, that was the news that mattered most to me.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=261

But that’s a lovely line; that we now find ourselves ‘outside the family circle…’ We’re the outsiders looking in; not vice versa. We now need ‘permission’ to re-join their conversation; we need to bring something of value and worth to their tables, their camp-fires…

‘Much of the public that we believe we are serving needs to be persuaded that it cannot find out what’s going on in the world simply by looking at non-journalistic Web sites and blogs—that there is a special value to the work that news organizations do…

There it is again… what’s so special about what we do? Where’s the value you’re bringing to my party. What have you got to offer me…

‘We need to be more precise in our thinking about exactly how we are serving that oft-mentioned cause, the public’s right to know, at a time when, thanks to the Internet, the public has more free unmediated access to information than at any time in the history of the world…’

Why are we special? What makes us so clever and unique that we can charge you for the privilege of reading our thoughts?

And that’s the charge he set them… to stop gazing at their navels; open their eyes to where their audience is and re-engage – catch them up again…

‘You will not only have to reinvent journalism, you will also have to reinvent the conversation about journalism, making it less internal to the profession, and more interactive with the rest of society…’

It is a formidable challenge. One that none of us have yet cracked.

But, for me, right at the heart of all we say and do, lies one inescapable truth that Nick’s pal Clay first threw into the pot on the day of my 40th birthday some three long years ago.

People just want a good read.

And if that ‘good read’ is a 140-character Tweet from Stephen Fry, then we need to recognise that that’s where our former audience now sees value – for whenever they get a mo…

And if we think we can impose any other answer upon them then we’re doomed.

The Age Of Imposition has ended.