I was just trying to explain to a journalist about blogging. While I think there is a lot of rubbish about how blogging is going to replace print media, I do think that journalists should learn more about “social media” and the web. Just as pr companies need to pay more attention to what is happening online, so does the traditional media.

The web is just a new way of communicating. It’s a way of reaching millions of people immediately, in the moment, as it happens. You would think this would be a perfect way to report news. Imagine people had been blogging, twittering and updating their facebook statuses during the great world events of the past 20 years. Imagine first hearing about the Berlin wall coming down from twitter and then watching it on qik as it happened.

Where we get our news from and how we get our news is going to change. It’s going to become faster, more up-to-date and more “bite-sized”. Does this mean the quality of news will suffer? Well yes and no; traditional media journalists are, for the most part, better writers. However, bloggers are not subject to a papers politics.

Another factor is snobbery. I think that some journalists are of the belief that everything a blogger writes is complete drivel, not constrained by the same checks and balances that they are. I think, however, this is wrong at the most basic level, if you write shite no-one will read it.