Journalism 2.0: It's for you

The Knight Citizen Network funded by the Knight Foundation has come out with a digital literacy guide for the information age in a 132-page must-see PDF file. It’s a resource for journalists and an intriguing look at the new wave of journalism which is even exciting for old timers. It will almost make you wish you could go back to work again.

The title is:

Journalism 2.0:
How to Survive and Thrive
A digital literary guide for the information age.

The author is Mark Briggs, a recovering sports writer who discovered what the Internet could do for journalism in 1998 and has been sharing his enthusiasm with whomever will listen (and some who won’t) ever since, contributing to textbooks, seminars and conferences on the topic. His day job is Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive News at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington. He has served as Editor of thenewstribune.com since 2004, when he was hired as Strategy and Content Manager for Interactive Media.

The foreword for the booklet was written by our own Philip Meyer who is the Knight Chair in Journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His 1973 book, “Precision Journalism,” was listed by Journalism Quarterly as one of 35 significant books of the 20th Century on journalism and mass communication. The fourth edition was published in 2002. His most recent book is “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” published in 2004. Posts on his work have appeared in previous posts on the Retirees blog and website.

You can learn about some strange acronyms such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), MB (megabytes) and RSS (Really Simple Syndication). They sound strange to us, but they are just incidentals in the news communications of the future which is already upon us. Learning we always be necessary.

Here’s a quote from the booklet:

The problem is that
everybody wants progress
but nobody wants change.

– Ulrik Haagerup, editor in chief of Nordjyske Media, Aalborg, Denmark

Click on the headline and download the PDF