Bookmark Vlog Blog
Feb
24
In this opinion piece by Guam journalist, Jason Salas, titled Participatory journalism and the inevitable death of newspapers, the author makes some good points about the changing media in our world and the need for media outlets to allow for more interaction if they’re to stay successful. Predicting the death of traditional newspapers, he writes:
Audiences in the Age of Information aren’t satisfied with the old dictum of media being unidirectional: those in the biz ramming the day’s events down your throat with you having little, if any, chance to interact. Audiences are now getting directly involved in the flow of a newsday. Producing news without giving the audience an opportunity to interact with it or with those who produced it is now seen as a severely inferior way of publishing since the paradigm shift brought about by the weblog.
Could one predict the same for TV after vlogs begin to take hold? Possibly, but for a different reason, I think.
It seems to me that the power of vlogalism (vlog journalism) won’t come so much from the ability to interact (that’s already yesterday’s news and will be automatically incorporated into most any vlogalism site). Vlogalism’s power will come from the fact that “news crews” will be literally everywhere in the world at all times. Anyone with a video camera will be able to record what’s happening. Of course traditional TV news stations already use interesting or newsworthy home video, but with the power to publish/broadcast yourself, you don’t have to wait for an editor to make a decision about whether something is “newsworthy” or not. Simply broadcast a vlog clip, and the democratic nature of the web will, in time, decide whether it sinks or swims as a story of consequence. Vlogs, like blogs, will eliminate that pesky middleman that sometimes has too much power for his or her own good. How many times have we read about the book author that toiled for years trying to get a book published, submitting to editor after editor? Finally someone takes a chance on it and it becomes a runaway best-seller. Now, it isn’t really fair to take a completely negative view of all those editors who turned the book down. No doubt they were doing their best. But the problem is, when determining what people want, or what’s important to people, one person’s best, no matter how good they are, is never enough. The only way to truly determine that is to float it out there. The web allows us to do that, and vlogs will thrive because of it.