The Media Center at the American Press Institute has published a “thinking paper” entitled “We Media” which looks at how journalism is being affected by new Internet technologies which are bringing the media’s audience to their in-box.
I wanted to take the time to read the document which weighs in a over sixty pages before I posted and I finally got around to it today.
Written by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, this paper is a must-read for anyone who works in media relations. Any trends that are impacting journalism also have a direct influence on media relations practitioners. And there are a whole range of trends.
It’s not only the arrival of weblogs, but discussion groups, audience generated content, collaborative publishing, peer-to-peer technologies and RSS. All these same technologies also have major implications for the PR profession, indeed this paper underlines just how connected our professions are.
We face many of the same challenges in understanding and using these new channels of communication.
“We Media” calls these changes Participatory Journalism and define it as:
“The act of a citizen or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.”
If you haven’t already done so, download this document today and spend some time reading it. It’s worthwhile and a useful manifesto on the changing environment that affects us all.
More PR-related comments on “We Media” are here: Phil’s Place, G2B Group.
Murphy's Law 