Vem rädds publiken?

En av anledningar tills varför bloggar och bloggandet skapar vånda inom journalistiken är just problemet härunder. Vad skiljer journalistik från icke-journalistik? Det är en fråga alltfler av våra läsare/tittare/lyssnare ställer sig. Och det är en viktig fråga.
Har webben, digitaliseringen, bredband, kabel-tv mm förändrat journalistiken? Hur? Och vad har det för betydelse för hur journalistiken ser på sig själv och hur publiken ser på journalistiken?
Vad har det haft för påverkan på hur vi utbildar journalister?

Var finns debatten?

PressThink:

"A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons... But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can't? Nothing. Generally speaking, they don't know any more about primary data and raw sources of information than we do--often less... And we bloggers are not dependent on our own resources or those of a few amateurs. We can get information from tens of thousands of individuals, many of whom have exactly the knowledge that journalists could (but usually don't) expend great effort to track down--to take just one recent example, the passability of the Mekong River at the Vietnam/Cambodian border during the late 1960s." [http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/007560.php]

I can hear the chucking this sort of thing causes in professional newsrooms and J-schools. But the basic point Hinderaker makes is the same one Dan Gillmor, a journalist, develops at length in his new and essential book, We the Media. 'My readers know more than I do,' Gillmor is famous for saying. That's readers, in the plural. Bloggers are putting that insight to work because they aren't as threatened by it.