New media is here. Get over it.

The fact is that many newsrooms are run by traditional minded journalists who resent new media’s transformation of old school reporting.

“ How can we trust these bloggers,” is a popular grumble among editors. And then there is the fear  of citizen journalists and that ‘their’ kind of reporting isn’t really journalism but more right wing/left wing perspective, knee jerk writing and sensationalism.

Some of that may be indeed be so, but if you’re an editor you would have to be living under a rock not to have noticed how social media has changed the way journalists communicate  with the public. 

For starters, Twitter (one of the fastest growing social communites)  is like a focus group on steroids. For a journalist it can  provide perspective, new angles for stories, quotes and even  a broadening  of  viewpoints. These insights are invaluable and  more important, critical for today’s news gathering procss.

I say its time editors stop this old vs new media fight. New media is here. Get over it.  Their  key  focus should be  how to integrate the two and more importantly how to build  a business model that sustains democracy’s most important asset. 

Oh yes, all that and getting the budget from the boardroom to make sure all  reporters have mobile technology.