Dan Gilmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, continues to be a strong advocate of viewing the journalism glass as being half-full. Here’s what he said in recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle: Journalism isn’t dying, it’s reviving
There’s never been a better time, I tell students, to be a journalistic entrepreneur — to invent your own job, to become part of the generation that figures out how to produce and, yes, sell the journalism we desperately need as a society and as citizens of a shrinking planet. The young journalists who are striking out on their own today, experimenting with techniques and business models, will invent what’s coming.
Most experiments will fail. That’s not a bug in the system, but a feature. It’s how we get better.
No one says the transition from what we’ve had to what’s coming will be painless. At best, it’ll be messy.
Try to ignore the fringes of this conversation: the old-guard doomsayers and/or elitists who see nothing but woe for journalism, and the tech-triumphalists and/or media haters who can’t wait to see today’s system blown to utter shreds. These are vapid, false choices. Let’s work to keep the best of traditional media.
Meanwhile, smart people — including the ones working for traditional media companies, most of which are still quite profitable even as trends work against them — will invent, discover and use democratized media tools to create updated and new kinds of journalistic products and services. The journalistic ecosystem could end up healthier in the end, if we get this right.