Journalists and Web 2.0 (draft)

Journalism Gets Social

Is this the era of participatory medical journalism?

The good old days of medical journalism

• We wrote, they listened.

• Clinicians and patients returned our phone calls.

• We controlled both the data and the publishing platform.

The good old days of medical journalism:

• Find and cultivate sources.

• Follow news and events in real time.

• Get story leads.

• Share interesting stuff.

• Promote yourself.

The new reality of medical journalism

• We write: is anyone listening? • Clinicians and patients still return our phone

calls – when they’re not blogging.• Data is shared; publishing platforms are

cheap and ubiquitous.• Citizen bloggers cover health and medical

news.• Given that, is journalism irrelevant?

Journalists are using social media as tools to:

• Find and cultivate sources.• Follow news and events in real time.• Get story leads.• Promote themselves.• Gossip.• Track trends.

What’s the future of journalism?

• “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.” -- Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

• “The Holy Grail territory … is this: Combine human and machine intelligence, to surface the stuff we need, as communities and individuals, that is trustworthy, reliable, and useful.” – Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media.

Journalists are experimenting with new ways to serve as

information filters

• Hyperlocal journalism.• Citizen journalism and pro-am journalism.• Entrepreneurship.• Microblogging.

Thanks to Dave Moser, Liz Scherer, David Bradley, Amy Gahran, Joe Bonner, Lee Aase,

Leslie Ann Bradshaw, Jay Levy, Denise Graveline, Carl Zimmer, Andrew Revkin, Amy Webb, Sara Clarke, Ivan Amato, Craig Stoltz,

Jay Rosen, Paulo Ordoveza, Chad Capellman, Molly McElroy, Allison Bland….

….. and the many others who have helped me learn about social media.

Questions?

• Find me at:nancy(at)[email protected]

twitter.com/nancyshute