Bloggers-in-Chief: What traditional journalists can learn from bloggers

When I spoke to KQED news editor Bruce Koon last week in my Digital Journalism class at Santa Clara University, he startled me with a prediction. Our topic delved into the dysfunctional relationship between traditional metropolitan newspaper and the blogs that depend on them. 

"This is the one area that worries me the most because even while new solutions or a business models emerge, there could be a period in which journalism and the blogs dependency on it will be hurt," he said. "Doing watchdog journalism requires a lot more capital than what bloggers necessarily have."

His answer was simple: follow something like Huffington Post model and merge the traditional with the contemporary. To elaborate on what the means, Koon suggests hiring bloggers throughout the online world who've maintained notable following and place them side-by-side with traditional journalists in brands capable of investing the necessary capital for investigative pieces that garnish a news company's status yet provides very little revenue.  

Here the news industry is able to merge the new with the old; provide readers a level of interactivity and informality that has come with the blogging world while maintaining the trustworthiness and reputation of century-old newspapers. 

Although the Huffington Post leans much closer to a blog than a traditional news  website, he suggests that major newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, which is currently facing the possibility of shutting its printing press, should have, in the early days of new media, enveloped rather than disenfranchised bloggers. 

But he also reveals that such an idea may be too late. 

"There are dozens of other outlets now and new options for us that the news audience is really fragment."

But I suspect it wouldn't hurt to try.

Koon Thinks College Journalism Students Have More Answers than Questions on the Fate of the News Industry

On Thursday, head of the news department at KQED, Bruce Koon explained to students of Sally Lehrman's Digital Journalism the current divide in the news industry between digital natives and non-natives. He defined digital natives as those roughly twenty-five and younger who've been raised in a society surrounded with digital pieces of technology: digital camera and camcorders, laptops, iPhones and PDAs etc.. Non-natives, he explained, are the majority of journalists, who are struggling to figure out what role such new pieces of technology play in the industry.

This paradigm is an interesting perspective on the challenges facing the news industry. It explains the panic that has engulfed prospective journalists wishing to break through in the field. In several of my own journalism classes, I've been bombarded with lecture after lecture on how journalism is going through an era of redefining. It's discouraging, if not outright heart-breaking to sit in class and hear established journalists describe the dilemma. 

Yet Koon's simple lecture is inspiring. He places the torch in our hands - the hands of aspiring journalists raised in an era of digital breakthroughs. He lets us know that digital natives won't face the severe challenges those in the industry currently face.

His speech leads me to think, perhaps, those industry should turn more towards young readers and ask them, "What do you think?" Perhaps more Journalism professors should turn to their students and ask, "What do you think is the answer?" Chances are, we know more than anyone else.