Social journalism. I bumped into that term after I wrote yesterday’s post and was investigating further the idea of personal journalism or personal monitoring.

I hadn’t realized Social Journalism was a term out there. My bad. Sorry. The only weasel excuse I can offer is that this cldwrld project affects so much so deeply I can hardly keep up with it.

I like this definition on the publish2 blog from the end of July this year:

“What’s Social Journalism?  It’s what you do when you gather information in social media channels and then report it to your readers.”

In a note I wrote in 1993 I called one section (quoted here): Will print publishing inherit electronic publishing? (where electronic publishing has become “digital publishing”). I saw two groups of people who had the potential to take the same prize. The first were the print publishers. The second were the “PC Software industry.” (C’mon, it was 1993!) In other words, traditional media people or the computer people.

I think I see the same kind of thing here.  I don’t have the expertise to talk about the future of newspaper (as I have said before), but now that I know the term Social Journalism I can write yesterday’s post more clearly and expand on it.

In April Woody Lewis wrote an article for Mashable called Social Journalism: Past, Present and Future. which pointed me to a great article (it’s not just me who has that opinion) by Dan Conover called 2020 vision: What’s next for news, written in March. In that article in Section III, “The known competitors (2009-2014)” he writes, as point 15:

“Intelligent aggregation. Human aggregations of relevant content add value by improving the signal-to-noise ratio and scanning all relevant media, including coverage from bloggers, Tweeters, etc. The more diverse the mediascape, the greater the need for this service. Likely result? Many aggregators, each with a different combination of revenue sources and relationships to the content producers they cover.”

which I think not only has the meat of the term Social Journalism (it actually is talking about more than that) but speaks to its consequences.

Once again I see the two groups, the traditional media folk and the computer folk going for the same prize – effective sort-and-report on information-at-large (ESR on IAL). From the traditional media side will come Social Journalists. From the computer side will come Conversation Monitors (“The Conversation” is described in yesterday’s post).

There will be both human and software solutions. There will be both independents (using, for example, a fee per hour or STI model – see STI tagged posts) and companies operating in the space.

Our example company would be The Conversation Group. It provides one-stop shopping for all the possible solutions – the personal reporters, journalists and monitors, the software (like the publish2 software or the Cloud Monitoring software at RightNow) and the teachers of tools. It doesn’t exist yet (as far as I am aware).

So that’s how I see it playing out.

But I think there’s a bit more to it than that and in the next post I’ll discuss the connection between The Conversation and something called the Real-Time Web (RTW).

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