Your vision of journalism seems to share a similar blind spot to Rosen’s: see the comments in his post My Coordinates for a Successful News Site.

In the world before the Internet, the job of journalism was encumbered by the task of delivering all sorts of non-news-related material just because reporters happened to be working in a medium that was efficient at disseminating that information. Newspapers contain the comics and the baseball box scores and stock market closing prices. Local TV news includes traffic data and weather forecasts. Network morning TV news includes fashion shows, cooking demonstrations and rock concerts. Political TV news can consist of the mere carriage of an event — a Presidential press conference, a Congressional hearing, a candidates’ debate — documenting a proceeding rather than reporting on it.

The expanded media universe that the Internet offers allows journalists to shuck off that extraneous baggage and to concentrate on their core job: to find what is newsworthy, informing citizens of developments and controversies in their community, in the body politic, and in the world at large, so they need not act like civic illiterates.

The key term here is news. Journalists have a specialized way of looking at the world. It involves isolating, selecting and emphasizing those aspects of daily life that are unusual, controversial, innovative, counterintuitive, salient; events that change the status quo or require the status quo to change in response. There are plenty of other people examining the real world and producing non-fictional information — librarians, encyclopedians, essayists, commentators, academics, polemicists, activists — whose priority is not to find the newsworthy elements in the day’s events and create headlinegrabbing narratives out of them.

To me, BuzzMachine’s speculations on Beatblogging refer to the entire universe of producing non-fiction information — not to what journalists should do. Using BuzzMachine’s examples, I fail to see why it is the special job of journalists to act as as intermediary between experts, or to facilitate wiki-histories, or to educate, or to gather information. In fact, all of those roles are probably better accomplished by those who are not looking for what is newsworthy — because emphasizing the newsworthy over the mundane is, inevitably, a distorting process.

To repeat myself, this is how I commented on Rosen’s thread: “The current phase of fragmentation and atomization of the media offers an opportunity to shuck off the baggage of non-news, safe in the knowledge that those important functions are being taken care of elsewhere. Thus journalists can concentrate on the task at hand.” The same criticism applies to the idea of Beatblogging.

In your world, a reporter is an informed grocery clerk, telling readers what aisle they can go do to check out the chicken special: a “moderator, vetter, enabler, encourager.”

But I can see your point about networks, informed networks, which have developed the practiced skills and tools needed to effectively pull out information from primary sources, or as we use to call it news gathering. I just don’t buy it.

A journalist is a disruptive agent. They don’t buy into networks. Most barely buy into their employer. That’s a character trait that was in place before he/she took their first job.

I think that’s what beginning to trouble me about the direction of your analysis. It supposes that new systems emerging will get at the old problems in a better way. Where have I read this before — this belief that a new man emerges from new systems?

In the big picture truth the journalists is like the artist, motivated by a need to explore mystery and emerge with a story. Only a few in our time will ever produce that essential truth, but whoever does it will be do so because of their inner life and not because of their networked one. Your analysis doesn’t grasp any of this.

It’s a process of creative destruction and at the moment it favours those who can combine hard science/tech skills and can connect with audiences. I do have a hard time seeing the average journalist arbitrating specialist conversations that are already taking place anyway.

There is perhaps some higher polymath style function that is needed in a more complex society, but I doubt journalism schools are preparing their students for such roles. All of this, as usual, ignores the cinderella profession of trade journalism, which I’m assuming is in rude health happily helping drive the economy forward.

> A reporter should make connections: Well, expert A, you say this but expert B says that, why don’t you read each others’ blog posts and push your ideas toward consensus or clear disagreement? Or expert B needs a fact that expert A might have and the reporter makes that connection.

What are the odds that an outsider knows about A and B but A and B don’t know about each other? (Hint - low.)

An expert, by definition, knows more of what’s relevant in a given field than outsiders.

> When you think about it, that has always been the mission of journalism: organizing information so communities can organize their activities.

Bollocks.

Scienceblogs is run by maybe 1.5 “journalists” - the other 60+ folk, the bloggers, are folks who blog there as a hobby or in support of their other projects… and I can virtually guarantee none are making a living wage from the effort.

The only real curators out there are Slashdot, BoingBoing, etc. Which makes Mark and Xeni and Cmdr. Taco the curators there - the sphincters of large funnels of user suggestions.

I’m not sure anyone’s yet put together what you’re describing. In fact, I’m not convinced that the old model is so different from the new one, except that now the market has fragmented so thoroughly that I no longer have to rely on a few thousand journalist / sphincters to get my information — I can rely on tens of thousands of them or more, each catering to the narrowest slivers of my particular spectrum of interests.

Also proud to be a part of it. It’s not that this is anything “new.” But we hope it will be a methodical approach - really trying to figure out how this all works.

Funn you say “What if the reporter does such a good job organizing such a good network that it runs on its own….so that the reporter isn’t needed anymore? Could happen, no? But I don’t think it will — if reporters learn to redefine themselves.”

I had that exact conversation last night. There seems to be this fear that if the reporter isn’t out on the street “reporting,” then they have nothing to do. What we need to remember is that this is a changing job description. Community management is a part of web 2.0 — and it’s slowly becoming a part of journalism.