A blog ring for young journalists
Blog Buzz
Surfing the web is one of those things that you lose control over no matter how focussed your search be or how intent your purpose is. There is always that hyper link on the extreme left, catching your interest through the corner of your eye. You are clicking on it and opening it in a new window (now tab, thank God the browsers came up with them) even before you can make a microscopic connection with what you were looking for and what you are clicking on. This piece for example was originally intended to look at peer education for journalists through blogs. However in the course of my blog- hopping I stumbled upon a number of great journalism blogs that have radically altered the course of this article .Peer education will just have to wait, for what these blogs have to say probably can’t.
Journalism.co.uk - http://www.journalism.co.uk/ has recently started a blog-ring i.e. an online discussion forum for bloggers called ‘Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists’. It invites bloggers and journalists to debate topics on a monthly basis by posting on the issue. An extract from a post inviting entries for the August debate form Chairman Dave Lee goes like so-
‘Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been rounding up some of the world’s best young blogging journalists. Our goal: to create an open forum for young journalists to debate issues important to them. And as tomorrow’s journalists, our issues should be important to everyone in the media industry…’
…So together I hope we can really get stuck in. And boy, we sure do have a lot to talk about. What is it like being a young journalist in the year 2008? Let’s get started.’
The TNTJ blog ring has already received numerous posts from professionals, bloggers and students on problems that they think young journalist face. Issues discussed are as basic as job security, to balancing social lives and go onto larger concerns such as lack of innovation, changing attitudes, challenging old school ideas, and meeting the demands of a high pressure industry.
Thought the contributors are mostly westerners, the issues they voice are common for most journalists around the world. Flexibility of the blog culture allows for a rather uncontrolled thread of discussion where the notions of media are challenged and young journalists talk about their adaptability to the monumental changes that the media industry faces with the recession in newspaper reading and the advancements in convergent technologies. This is well articulated in a post by Vera Alves a journalist from
‘The young generations grew up in a world where media is totally different to what it was for our parents and the generations before them. Like any social change, it takes some time to adjust to a new reality and there is always a culture and generational clash…’
TNTJ is interesting in its approach because it lets the journalists set the agendas of discussion on what they consider priorities rather than senior media big shots. The young journalist’s point of view is taken into account rather than the standard eloquences on grave media crises that such discussions tend to draw. It is engaging without becoming too advisory in nature which may have a lot to do with the profiles of the contributors. The writing is simple and attempts to take a very honest look at thing which may aspiring journalists would identify well with.