Reportr.net

Last week’s Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff didn’t generate as much online coverage as similar conventions tend to do in the US. One of the few people providing updates was Paul Bradshaw via Twitter alerts. But then, there is only so much you can get into 140 words.

He did write a piece for the UK Press Gazette, picking up on two of the presentations. The original draft of the story, on Paul’s blog, led with comments by Jane Singer.

She argued that the current mass market, ad-driven model for newspapers was an historical anomaly and that now we were going through a process Singer called ‘punctuated equilibrium’.

We don’t need journalists to cover minutiae, to spend so much time on things they don’t need to be doing, like sports scores, and press releases, and acting as a ‘middle man’ between a source and their audience. We need journalists to put information into context, to do it without fear or favour.

This gets to the heart of how journalists add value to information. A journalist should be explaining the how and why of a story. In an age of an abundance of information, context is all.