Frédéric Filloux had an interesting post this week on The Need for a Digital “New Journalism” in which he calls for “an urgent evolution in the way newspapers are written” online. Among other points, Filloux — who writes the Monday Note, an insightful weekly column about “media, tech, and business models” — winds up by exhorting digital media to “invent its own journalistic genres.”
The web and its mobile offspring, are calling for their own New Journalism comparable to the one that blossomed in the Seventies. While the blogosphere has yet to find its Tom Wolfe, the newspaper industry still has a critical role to play: It could be at the forefront of this essential evolution in journalism.
While I’m not entirely sure that a kind of New Journalism isn’t already at work on the Web — and it may well have its Tom Wolfe already — I appreciate Filloux’s broader point: instead of decrying the “death of journalism,” newspapers and news reporters of whatever stripe would be far better off to simply reinvent it. Stalwart institutions like The New York Times still carry enough weight to have a serious influence on the future of electronic journalism, should they so choose. But that won’t last forever.
