I read the following article: Gannett To Change Its Papers’ Approach on www.washingtonpost.com and thought it was an interesting article to share.
Prior to this course and reading this article, I have to be honest that I never really knew what the term “citizen journalist” was or rather what sort of a role a citizen journalist had and what that meant for journalists in general. However, I have seen this term repeatedly, whether it is has been in our class book, referenced in class, and now through several articles I have read.
This article basically talks about the “attempt to grab some of the Internet mojo of blogs, community e-mail groups and other ground-up news sources to bring back and fundamentally change the idea of what newspapers have been for more than a century.”
Gannett wants to merge their newspaper and online operations into single units and will also be drawing on non-journalists or “citizen journalists” in the process. Gannett has been testing its new system in several of its newspapers since July, and now the company’s newspapers are being urged to make the transition quickly. The article did mention that USA Today would not undergo the overhaul, though it has merged its newspaper and online staffs.
“It’s pretty big,” said Michael Maness, Gannett’s vice president of strategic planning. “It’s a fairly fundamental restructuring of how we go about news and information on a daily basis.
I also found it interesting how they have restructured their departments to contain an “Information Center” that is divided into 7 areas including: public service, digital, data, community conversation, local, custom content and multimedia.
This “movement” so to speak is really just demonstrating how the media is absolutely changing into a true converged medium. No longer are the days of a reporter just using a notepad and pencil. Now journalist are really faced with the challenge of being able to adapt and learn this new technology that has arrived and will continue to develop.
This makes me happy knowing that I am getting a head start in the game and am taking the time and effort to be “trained” in this new developing medium. I think this program in Interactive Journalism will give us the tools and preparation we need to know in order to achieve our professional goals.
—Vanessa Camozzi
Vanessa Camozzi 