Its not about citizens becoming journalists – but journalists becoming citizens
Today The Times launched its new online edition, which it will effectively be closing again late June when it starts to ask people to pay for it. Times editor, James Harding, was interviewed this morning on the Today programme desperately trying to justify how initiatives such as this represented the salvation of journalism and reporting.
Laying aside the nature of the journalism and reporting that such an initiative is expected to preserve and also the arrogance in many of the assertions that Harding made that essentially implied that news just can’t happen unless some bloke with a notebook is there to ‘make sense of it’, there is a huge flaw in the thinking that upon which the whole paid-for content approach is based. This flaw is the unquestioned assumption that journalism and journalist are one and the same. Or to put it another way, the only way that journalism can be achieved is through the institutional structures of one-to-many mass media. Continue reading