Mark Briggs from Serra Media calls his book “Journalism Next” a guidebook for digital reporting and publishing. Briggs was at SXSWi Tuesday morning to get journalists headed on the right track.
“This isn’t the end of journalism,” Briggs said. “Instead, it’s an explosion of journalism – just in different forms.”
Briggs made several key points to hammer that idea home. First, he said journalism isn’t going away just because newspapers are hemorrhaging jobs. He said much has been made about Hearst’s decision to stop printing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. However, Briggs said many neighborhoods in Seattle actually have three or four community newspapers now. Just because one went away, doesn’t mean there is a lack of content. Secondly, people are using social media more for journalism these days. Journalism posts on Facebook are up 500% in the past six months. Twitter has seen a huge explosion in journalism posts. In other words, social media are evolving. Finally, Briggs believes mobile journalism is a key for the future. The average person now gets a cell phone at the age of nine. Media institutions have to recognize this and adapt how they deliver content.
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“Journalism Next” sounds like a good read. My question would be how relevant will it be in a month? Journalism evolves so quickly now through the various avenues of social media, I’m unclear as to why a book was published instead of just one, long Facebook note.
I agree with Briggs though. Journalism seems to be mimicking a pheonix; burning in the ashes of traditional media to transform into an entirely new creature, worthy of writing a book about. I’ll have to check it out.
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I agree – I have an overall problem with journalism textbooks in general for that very reason. I have not personally read Journalism Next (its on my list though) but I have been assured by people I have 100% faith in that it is amazing. In fact, my professor uses it as a textbook for one of her undergrad web classes.