Joe Think: Online news, from the trenches

Bruno Giussani is a smart smart man.

Check out what he wrote about journalism and the internet, all the way back in 1999:

I do not consider the Internet - and generally the online medium - as a substitute to other media, but as a complement, a new channel of communication which takes its place alongside the others. I am going to position myself here as a journalist and an editor. Because it’s my original profession. Because it’s also the profession I am trying to re-invent (or more accurately, to learn again from scratch) since I have been doing it online. And mostly, because I firmly believe that journalists have an essential role to play in tomorrow’s interactive society and that they are quite wrong in fearing to become obsolete with the advance of the new media.

And this set of bullet points about things today’s journalists will have to deal with:

1. The behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search.
2. Geography is no longer an issue.
3. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots.
4. We will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.
5. We will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques.
6. We are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today - the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard.

Read the article, A New Media Tells Different Stories, here.