To Save Journalism We Must Rid Ourselves of Journalists

After a little too much thinking out loud, I decided to start fresh and focus on a single idea.

"Citizen Journalists", bloggers are called. Jonathan Klein famously complained that a blogger is just "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas."

Yet it is undeniable that blogs have had an impact.

So we ask ourselves: what is the proper place of these amateurs in relation to the professional news organizations?

My own conclusion: the real problem is that the traditional media is in a sense entirely staffed by amateurs.

Allow me to elaborate: you wouldn't call a dentist for help if what you needed was someone who could tell you how to fix your car, correct?

Well what, exactly, makes mainstream journalists anything less than an amateur on the subjects that they write about?

Browsing through the Columbia School of Journalism website, which is supposed to be the place to go to become a journalist, I can't say that I'm finding anything particularly impressive. They get a good general background in the humanities and sciences, I guess.

But if you look at what's important to have on a resume, it seems to me that all people care about is whether you've written on a newspaper before, or been an anchor in some form, or talked on the radio.

And anyone can do that. More to the point, sharpening your ability to write, speak, and present yourself does not make you more qualified than anyone else to analyse a situation.

I am now at a place to disagree with my old stance entirely, and watching the Pajamas Media Website struggle to develop a new model has brought me here.

The answer is not to make the mainstream model as close to blogging as possible.

The path that up and coming Mainstream press outlets should be taking, from both a business perspective as well as a content-quality perspective, is to eliminate all traces of non-specialists from their payroll.

What's the point of embedding someone to report what's going on in Iraq if he's just some guy who has no background in military strategy, technology, or history? Wouldn't it make more sense to hire someone who specializes in the history of the Middle East, or the history of Iraq specifically, or general military history, or American Foreign Policy history, or all of the above and then some?

PJM actually tinkered with one aspect of this just recently, when they invited a group of economists to discuss the state of the US economy. No broad, colorless consensus was reached, but a group of people who are greatly well read in the field were put in one easy to access place and told to go at it. The result is that if anyone wants to find a diversity of perspectives among specialists talking about their own field, you can find it at PJM.

The role of the amateur is not going away--if anything, it has augmented. Now that information is so readily accessible, anyone with a computer can find out anything that any particular journalist knows and more.

So the traditional model of the newspaper or news station as a place to go to for information is rapidly becoming obsolete--we don't need information given to us anymore, because we can seek it out elsewhere. What we could use are places that give us the perspectives of educated and experienced voices from various fields.

In this way, the old brand of journalists could be tossed aside entirely because the amateurs are here to pick up the slack, and the mainstream presses could sell themselves as the Encyclopedia Britannicas of news.