Journalists - This time, it’s personal

By A.ASOHAN
Digital News Editor at The Star
twitter.com/Asohan

Journalists today are increasingly finding it hard to draw a line between their personal and professional personas.

Some of the greatest changes wrought by technology in recent years have been in the field of media, specifically journalism.

We’re not just talking about the mushrooming of alternate sources of news, from independent news portals and socio-political blogs to participatory and citizen journalism, but how even traditional, mainstream journalists have changed the way they work.

They are finding that they’re now more “vulnerable”. The distance between journalists and their readers has shrunk or disappeared completely. While some readily embrace the added advantage of being able to engage directly with their readers, others find it hard to respond to curt, often harsh and sometimes downright unfair criticism.

If we’re being overwhelmed, we journalists only have ourselves to blame. These are not sudden, overnight changes – they have been nibbling away at the wall separating producer and consumer for more than a decade now.

Pundits and observers like US-based Dan Gillmor (dangillmor.com) and Malaysia’s own Oon Yeoh (oonyeoh.squarespace.com) were writing about this even as far back as the 1990s.

Gillmor, the former San Jose Mercury News technology columnist, was among the first journalists to see how blogging was going to change his profession; he embraced the new channel with such enthusiasm that he became an inspiration to many others.

But even blogging was just another new technology nibbling away at the wall. The older, more humble e-mail had already effected some changes with the journalists who recognised its value before blogging became a buzzword. Writers who published their e-mail addresses would be inundated with relatively immediate feedback, from “Gr8! I agree” to “u suck”.

(In case you’re wondering, it’s StarMag policy to publish a general e-mail address for feedback to its columns because the editor wants to keep abreast of such feedback too.)

I remember at one stage when I was editor of In.Tech, The Star’s technology pull-out, in the late 1990s to early 2000s, about half my working day could be taken up by reading and responding to readers’ comments. It was demanding, enervating and also very rewarding. Readers came up with great ideas for issues we could tackle, and we would also adopt some of their suggestions for new regular features. When we couldn’t, I would have to explain why.

Sure, there were the “u suck” critics, but the constructive ones were key in getting us to do a better job.

When blogging took off a few years ago (and not only in March last year, as some think), not many journalists took the plunge. The ones who did so were generally in the “safer” beats such as technology, where you only faced personal attacks if you made the mistake of getting involved in the religious war between Mac OS and Windows users.

There were bloggers who covered socio-political issues, but they were mostly non-journalists, or former journalists.

Those who jumped on the bandwagon had to face immediate reactions to anything they wrote. Some developed the thick skin needed to survive, others quietly dropped out, while the rare few recognised that the game had changed yet again.

Just as important as the blog post were the comments that followed it. You write something, a reader adds to it, another responds to that reader, and so on. There was an exponential increase in content, or as Gillmor used to describe it, journalism as a conversation.

However, it is true that it has only been in the last couple of years that these “nibbly” changes have gathered into a critical mass. Large swathes of the wall have just crumbled. These days, even stick-in-the-mud traditional journalists find that they have to adopt new media technologies and techniques to remain relevant. There’s just no going back.

Already we’ve seen, in the past few months, how “microblogging” via Twitter.com has just changed the landscape yet again.

Politicians on both sides of the landscape (both in terms of political affiliation and age) such as DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang and Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin are sending real-time updates from Parliament. News sites such as The Star Online (thestar.com.my) and our competitors have journalists on Twitter so that they can send blow-by-blow accounts from the field.

It’s concise (with a 140-character limit), in-your-face, and immediate, with no editorial filters.

And, not surprisingly, when people engage with people, communities are formed. When The Star reporter Yeng Ai Chun, covering the High Court case a few weeks ago that determined who was the rightful mentri besar of Perak, “tweeted” that she had been kicked out of the courtroom, she got a tsunami of responses on twitter.com (twitter.com/aichunstar), some of which expressed concern for her welfare, while others wondered whether if it was because she was tweeting from the courtroom.

Journalists have finally been given a human face.

Public relations consultant and industry pundit David Lian writes in his blog, davidlian.com, that “when journalists Twitter, you’d realise that journalists are real people who have feelings, opinions, and ethics. Most importantly, they are right there, on location.”

He referred to The Star Deputy Executive Editor Wong Sai Wan (twitter.com/saiwanstar), whose tweets may range from news updates and his views to his long wait at a local hospital. (If you follow me on Twitter, at twitter.com/Asohan, you’ll get some breaking news, but will also have to deal with bad geek jokes, Star Trek, and anything else I’m in the mood to tweet.)

Other micro-blogging journos may pepper their Twitter account with everything from a breaking news item to what is being served as refreshments at a press conference. They are not merely professionals any more; they’ve become brands as well.

Twitter is so much the current “next big thing” that Time magazine dedicated it’s June 15 cover story to it, leading one US wag to comment that you know something has reached the mainstream when Time puts it on the cover. The issue was so much in demand that the copy I left on my desk at work one evening was nicked.

Expect this phenomenon to be examined deeply over the next few months, leading to interesting articles like Twitter vs CNN (tinyurl.com/m8gfys) and whole conferences dedicated to it ... at least, until the next big thing.

(StarMag, by the way, featured Twitter.com and tweeting in its May 3 cover story, A little bird told me, Insight.)

We journalists will all be struggling to understand and harness this new technology, which is why Julie Posetti’s Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter (tinyurl.com/llrw5w) is extremely timely.

While journalists have embraced micro-blogging, media organisations may find it harder to do so. Even a blog can be controlled to certain extent, because a journalist blogger can be asked to change his post. More importantly, he has time to consider what he’s going to publish and whether it would be acceptable to the media organisation that employs him.

You don’t have that luxury with tweets. It’s about journalists telling you like it is, as it is happening. And what they think about it. There’s no time to consider editorial stances or policies. It will be interesting to see how Malaysian media organisations deal with this new reality.