Valley PR Blog

Do-It-Yourself journalism

By Len Gutman on January 23rd, 2007 In Hype!

There’s a new trend in the newspaper business that has me conflicted. I didn’t know what to call this trend until I saw the following on the web site of the Tucson Explorer newspaper this morning:

Welcome to the Do It Yourself community journalism section. The part of the site where YOU are the author. Is your club having a fundraiser? Is your 50th wedding anniversary approaching? Did your student win an award at school? We’d like to hear about it. Do It Yourself journalism allows the reader to alert the greater Oro Valley.

Do-it-Yourself Journalism? Am I the only person scared by this concept? I spent four years in college to earn a Journalism degree and it turns out all I had to do was wait until the end of the 20th century for journalism to become a trade of the people.

Or am I overreacting? Are newspapers really doing a community service by allowing people to post whatever they want on their web sites under the guise of journalism? Or is this just a way for reporters and editors to clean out their in-boxes of all the junk that people send to them pretending to be news? I’ve posted news releases to the Independents “self-service” site but I don’t know if anyone reads them or if they just end up in cyber-nowhere.

Any reporters out there care to comment? Any PR people actually posting releases to these sites?

Comments

To this question “Or am I overreacting? Are newspapers really doing a community service by allowing people to post whatever they want on their web sites under the guise of journalism?” the answer is YES - YOU ARE OVER REACTING! (all caps always are best to start a flame war).

The major point is that it is not either/or any more than it was radio *or* TV. History shows it is both. We definitely need the voice in the field. The camera phones recording the Shins concert.

And we need professional journalists. Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert are not feeling threatened at the moment. And neither should PR professionals. Have a cup of coffee and embrace the competition. Just be better. Simple, eh?

Do-it-Yourself Journalism is what the media has to do when (a) they have no more staff because of layoffs necessitated by profit-based owners who have raised the bar for year-end profit and (b) they have no subscribers and need some evidence of reader-viewers in order to entice advertisers to join along.
Wait for the pendulum to swing back before making any pronouncements of doom and gloom.

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