A few takeaways from this morning’s presentations at the Knight Foundation meeting today in Chicago:
- The stenography ends here. The days of chasing cops and government down for raw data (crime blotter, etc.) to parse into 8 inch stories is coming to an end. Everyblock and the Sunlight Foundation are a good start. More projects that extend these efforts to get government to make raw digital data available are an essential step to newsroom reorganization.
- New media tools are (just?) a means to an end, but ignore the trends at your own peril. While it doesn’t matter which video platform you use to get content out into the diaspora, it matters that you understand that there are existing best practices for online video, there are independent producers of news, entertainment and information using those platforms and practices, and there are HUGE success stories already in the medium.
- The idea that professional journalism is the “lifeblood of democracy” could be outdated. Could be. When the barrier to publication and communication is as low as it is today, the democratic role of things like newspapers has to evolve. There’s a big disconnect between the necessary giant investigative award-winning reporting coming from places like the New York Times and Washington Post and the type of local investigative work that gives a community information that affects their daily lives. They’re getting that information from many sources, and not all of them are professional capital-J Journalism.
Awesome conversations here as always. Follow some of the livetweeting if you can.
Ryan Sholin 