Is there a risk that citizen journalism can be gamed by “PR flacks and unqualified hacks” — Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones thinks so.

Unfortunately, he casts the issue in terms of the risk that economically burdened newsrooms will trade expensive quality journalism for no-cost, untrustworthy content — instead of looking at the very real […]

As I read this year’s first crop of posts from the smartest voices on the future of journalism, it’s clear that 2008 is the change or die year for journalism, as symbolized by the uncertain future of the newspaper industry.

This is the year that the journalists who will embrace the challenge of transforming journalism for […]

Kara Swisher, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, who has covered the Silicon Valley boom and bust for the print WSJ newspaper, has announced that she’s gone all digital, i.e. she will be writing exclusively for the All Things Digital web site. Which made me wonder how many other journalists would go all digital if […]

Apple has settled a lawsuit with the popular Apple rumor blog Think Secret, which requires the blog to cease publication. This news, not surprisingly, has the blogosphere up in arms — certainly there is the appearance that Apple acted dictator-like in silencing a new voice of the Fourth Estate. As Mathew Ingram put it: […]

On the face of it, the question of whether blogs can do journalism is absurd — like asking whether sites published on Vignette can do journalism. A blog, after all, is just a content management system — revolutionary because it made web-native publishing free and easy for anyone — but at the end of the […]

It used to be the product of journalism was static — printed column inches in a newspaper or magazine, a TV segment, etc. — when it was in the can, that was it. Done. The only additional mode of activity was printing a correction the next day, or perhaps a follow-up story. But the original […]

The Huffington Post has unveiled a new comment system that allows top commenters to become featured bloggers on the site. I interviewed Arianna Huffington about the new system — our Q&A appears below. First, a few thoughts on the idea of promoting commenters to bloggers.

NowPublic has taken a big round of financing and, according to Mathew Ingram, was in a position to turn down acquisition offers. This is being hailed as the success of “citizen journalism” or “crowdsourcing,” but it strikes me that it’s really just the success of….journalism.

The words we use to describe things can have a powerful […]

Thanks to Dick Costolo, zen master entrepreneur and all around righteous dude, who cited Publishing 2.0 as one of his favorite blogs in a WSJ piece about 10 years of blogging, I got asked to make a video. Choosing from a bunch of questions, I decided to go serious on the blogger vs. journalist (non)issue, […]

I just went to the New York Times homepage and saw that political reporter Katharine Seelye is “live-blogging” the democrat’s New Hampshire Debate. Newspapers and other mainstream media have had blogs for quite a while, but this strikes me as the moment when blogs officially went mainstream and when journalism crossed a tipping point of […]

Neil Henry, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, has a lament about the decline of newspaper journalism in the soon to be editorially downsized San Francisco Chronicle. He puts forth some good examples of the types of investigative journalism that are at risk of being defunded. He also displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what […]

While everyone is hand-wringing over the decline of the news business and the attendant decline in Journalism and the Fourth Estate, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is doing something about it, having just announced the first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, with $12 million in grants. Here are some of the […]

The hallmark of the new media revolution is that the balance of power is shifting to individuals — on the web, anyone can can be a publisher, individuals can make their voices heard through comments on nearly every item of content, and search puts individuals rather than media brands in control of content discovery. But […]

What do offline media journalists have in common with Made For AdSense publishers, i.e. online publishers who create sites with junk content for the sole purpose of making money off of Google’s pay-per-click ads? Quite a lot it seems — Google is destroying their business models from either end of the content quality spectrum. Compare […]

So here’s my perspective on the Calacanis/Winer/Jarvis v. Vogelstein/Wired debate on how journalist interviews should be conducted — both sides are right and also wrong.

Blogging is conversation, yeah, blah, blah, but what’s so unsatisfying about these “conversations” is that too often they turn into linked monologues. Nobody actually TALKS to each other. Everyone just […]

By now we are all quite familiar with the upside of blogging — free, easy-to-use software and the powerful network effects of the web have enable thousands of people who might never have had a voice back in the days of scarce publishing resources to have their voices heard far and wide. But you rarely, […]

There seem to be two principal reactions to the collapse of the print classified business that is destroying the print newspaper business. The first reaction is to insist, as San Francisco columnist David Lazarus does, that people should pay for the news. The second reaction is evident in the report from Tim O’Reilly about trouble […]

Jay Rosen proposes a new model for jouralism — “In simplest terms, a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net.” What jumps out at me, beyond the effort to empower “pro-am, open-source” journalism, is that it’s a nonprofit endeavor, driven by donations.

Jay empahsizes that NewAssignment.Net […]

The phenomenon called blogging has now been starkly divided into the pre-PayPerPost era and the post-PayPerPost era. I’m referring to a new service that makes an explicit business model out of what up until now has been an implicit accusation, often leveled without cause. PayPerPost enables companies to pay bloggers to say nice things about […]

I’m headed off to the Mesh Conference in Toronto, where I’ll be on a panel with Om Malik, Michael Tippett, and Mathew Ingram, debating whether bloggers are journalists.

I’m with Jay Rosen on this:

The question now isn’t whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn’t whether bloggers “are” journalists. They apparently are, […]

Do we need professional journalists, editors, and publishers to help filter the sea of information and help keep us informed — do they have a place in Media 2.0? Most Web 2.0 advocates would argue, NO (we don’t need no stinkin’…)!

This school of thought embraces what I can only describe as anti-hiearchicalism, which, at the […]

From an interview with Michael Wolff:

I’m not a fan of the idea that I should be a blogger, let me say that. One should probably be distrustful of blogs. One should probably be distrustful of most things one reads. The quicker the things that you read are written, the more you should be distrustful of […]

It’s now conventional wisdom that the future of media is digital and on-demand — content creators no longer own the distribution channels. But the economic center of gravity in media has not shifted to reflect this change. The laws of media dynamics will force the center to shift — advertising dollars always follow the audience, […]

The citizen journalism movement is shaking Old Media journalism out of its complacency, but is it realistic to believe that citizen media can and should replace institutional media? I remain deeply skeptical.

Jeff Jarvis is out in force again today, smacking the “dinosaurs” of Old Media for not understanding the power of the people. As usual, […]

The reactions to Dan Gilmor’s open letter on Bayosphere have fallen into two camps — lessons on start-ups and lessons on the dynamics of citizen journalism.

These perspectives, while important, miss the critical question in middle — who will fund citizen journalism, or any journalism, for that matter? As Justin Fox puts it in his […]

The problem with the current debate over Old Media vs. New Media is that most people see it in binary terms — either Old Media dies and the web becomes a completely open marketplace of commoditized content (as Jeff Jarvis and countless others have argued), or consumers rebel and cling to the structures of Old […]