Support Act
By Neil Dodds
03 April, 2006
Reporting from the Guardian's Changing Media Summit, Journalism.co.uk quotes veteran Channel Four anchor Jon Snow on how bloggers can force professionals to clean up their act:
"Citizen journalism won't supplant professional journalism, but it may actually professionalise it", Snow told the conference, "There's a sharp, exciting world there - made more exciting, more comprehensive and more vigorous in maintaining democracy by conspiring with the citizens and exposing the unprofessional media, which is what citizen media is doing all over the world."
Journalism.co.uk reports that Snow would be happy to see many of his colleagues leave the industry in the next few years. "When I entered journalism frankly there were plenty of people that just shouldn't have been there. Massive media organisations protect these people."
His instinct would seem to be shared by the Guardian's resident web guru Ben Hammersley, who spoke on how user-created content was putting pressure on professionals to improve their output, especially on the newspaper's comments pages.
"It's quite obvious if you're a professional journalist that if you're not very good, you're screwed," he said, "At some point your editor will start saying - why are we paying you this much money when Joe Bloggs the pyjama blogger is writing comment that is better than yours?"
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