The Media Changes, Again

Yesterday in the newspaper staff we talked about a newsbrief from ABC about their plans to change the way they do journalism. Basically, they are going to require their employees to learn more skills, and be almost completely responsible for each story from conception to completion. The result will be the loss of 300-400 jobs while others learn the skills to replace those workers. To read the story yourself, click here.

I also just read a blog from OJR about online newspapers giving "citizen journalists" more opportunities to...be journalists.

I find both of these news stories interesting. Journalism as a career has been both threatened and changing in the past years, and clearly, many companies are trying to adapt to the changes to prevent themselves from sinking.

The question for me is, is this going to help the media? I think it's a great idea to require journalists to gain more skills and to be able to manage their stories along any step in the process. But wouldn't it be better to have people specializing in each step to make sure quality is the highest, rather than one person taking care of everything and allowing weaknesses to develop? And it's also great to give regular people the opportunity to make the news...but one man's trash is another man's treasure. We will now have the opportunity to be exposed to badly researched and badly presented news stories from people who think they know what they are doing.

Where is the balance here? Where is the standard of quality?