We've got to keep our center. We've got to know what it is that we do, what are our core competencies, and other fancy terms being used these days in business, and build on those cores. That leaves lots and lots and lots of room for lots of other people to do very interesting and exciting things, and they're going to do them, and mazel tov. I want to believe the journey is going to be that simple and clear for journalists, but I can't. The reason is that journalism institutions have long played a role that transcended providing information.
Content is people , as well as information, and new media change the equation.
For all the talk of interactivity, I find very few journalists who really understand its import. Digital technologies really do make it easy to contact friends and strangers alike. That means they make things happen that were not possible before. For instance, last spring, a moving exchange took place on-line as Tom Mandel died. He had spent eighteen months trying to build community at Time magazine's America Online experiment, and for many years he'd been an active participant in the WELL, the protoypical cyberspace community.