Rick Forgione of the Niagara Gazette has posted an editorial about the frequent claims that “the newspaper industry is dying”. Forgione points out that people are always going to need news, no matter whether they read it in newsprint or on-line.
So how does print journalism co-exist with its Web site counterpart as we super speed into the future? Beats me, but I do know we try our best every day to put out informative and compelling content in both mediums, which will hopefully keep people reading (or clicking) for years to come.
On a related note, eCampus News reports that University of Denver journalism students are using Wikipedia as part of their curriculum. Not just as a research tool, but as a place to write articles. Because Wikipedia requires citations for its entries, writing Wikipedia articles is a good way for students to learn how to research topics in-depth.
“I see journalism as being completely online within the next two to five years,” [journalism instructor Christof Demont-Heinrich] said. “If you’re not trained to expect that and write for that, then you’re not going to be ready for the work world.”
Demont-Heinrich also wanted to combat the view that Wikipedia is unsuitable for academic uses. He notes that the site’s policy on citations makes it a great place to find links to reliable information sources.
The world is in the process of slowly changing newspaper readers into tele-news-readers, and it is nice to see a future generation of journalists being trained to take on-line writing, reporting, and research more seriously.
Wikipedia itself as a primary source is unsuitable for academic use, but you’d be a fool if you ignored potentially good sources that articles site. I don’t think anyone ever considered that unacceptable.
The quality of any publication online or off depends on its contributors. The problem with Wikipedia is that non-experts can purport to be experts so if more academics and other experts can contribute to it and trust is built up basedo on reliable articles/ sources/ citations etc, then that makes it a much more valuable source of information.