Shock! Horror! Journalists should forget news.

It used to be so easy. Police chased criminals, journalists chased police, ambulances and other surprises, and PR people chased journalists dressing marketing up as something with a deadline. Now policing is entwined with citizen-focussed service delivery, PRs should be offering social media press releases, and journalists need to forget news. Oliver Luft reports:

Newspapers need to forget news if they are going to prosper in the digital age, an industry conference was told today.
Opening the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna, Robert Cauthorn, CEO of CityTools, said that newspapers had lost the ability to tell communities the stories they are interested in.
Newspapers are guilty of talking only to decision makers, he said, and people were now shifting to form their own online communities around stories that interested them.
"All the wonderful reasons for being a journalist are rushing back and, ironically, it's because of the audience," he said.
"We need to forget news, we have got to get away from the idea of news and get back to stories.
"Our readers think of stories; news is an alien concept, stories are interesting. News is a terrible fate for a story to fall into."

A quick search shows Robert Cauthorn has an award for online journalism, and writes  provocatively in Rebuilding Media at Corante about the death of conventional news print. In his conference speech he cited the extent to which people were uploading video content, and rating content they find.

"People are exhausted of being asked to sit back and listen while the leaders talk; they want to get involved."
He told the conference that to remain relevant, newspapers needed to let readers write original material on their sites, not just to comment on existing stories, to engage them in a dialogue.
He also urged newspapers to put their archived content onto wiki software and allow readers to do the 'heavy lifting' of tagging stories along thematic and geographical lines so that they were easily accessible.

Trawling the comments at Corante I found a great one from Sean

What if newspapers were mentors?
What if newspapers were facilitators, not mouthpieces?
What if newspapers empowered authentic voices?
What if newspapers gave up a little power to get it back?An interesting experiment in community journalism partnered with a local newspaper:http://www.voicesinc.org

We could add the work that the BBC is doing in Manchester, working with local bloggers. Feels as if the social reporter is on the right track.
Update: Milverton Wallace celebrates the role of the amateur in networked communications.

Comments

[Paul Evans]

Newspapers *should* forget news? They certainly massively reduced anything that you would call 'reporting' for quite a long time now.

And there are plenty of people writing the kind of opinion peices that they pay for - often better ones - and getting published without any help from newspapers.

What if we just ignored newspapers altogether until they have the decency to start reporting instead of commenting again? I suspect that this accounts for a lot of the apparent hunger out there that is being met my citizen journos. I think that when newspapers try and co-opt this kind of thing, it devalues it anyway. Look at the bear-pit that 'Comment is Free' has become.