While looking over the new Vancouver Sun website recently (congratulations again on the redesign to Kirk Lapointe and his team), a blog post by Pamela Fayerman on the Sun’s Medicine Matters blog caught my eye.
Fayerman’s post, entitled Health and medical blogs; what interests you?, offers a couple of interesting thoughts on the changing nature of journalism:
We know that print stories are just a stop along the information highway for readers, not their final destination. Tom Rosenstiel, an author and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says reporters are like hunters/gatherers of information. Our role, on the digital side, is to do the aggregation work so that readers can use links where they can go to learn more.
Meanwhile, on my way home from work yesterday, I listened to the latest Media Bullseye Radio podcast with Ike Pigott. The panel featured a lively discussion about the role, nature and future of mainstream media and how it will influence social media (and vice versa) as different media channels converge.
There’s an interesting trend in these two pieces – they both talk about the different media coming together:
- Fayerman’s piece mentions media as aggregators (a role frequently played by bloggers)
- The Custom Scoop team talked about convergence between the different forms of media.
Over the last couple of years I’ve observed lots of discussions about the way that conversations are fragmenting. I’ve bemoaned this trend with social media tools as they take up ever-increasing amounts of time just to stay involved with the diverse channels.
I found it interesting that on one day I came across two mentions, on both sides of the old/new media divide, that mentioned a similar trend.
What do you think? Are channels fragmenting or converging?
Update: Ike offered a useful summary of his key points around convergence in the comments:
- “Print, radio and television news outlets aren’t really all that different when you look at their web components.
- The fear among all forms of media about “scooping yourself on your own website” is gone. Getting news on your site first does indeed count as “getting it on the record.”
- The typical silos that media relations people used to consider are gone. If you’ve got some relevant b-roll for your event or news release, you stand a better chance of getting it on the newspaper’s website than you do of the TV stations pulling from it.
- Eventually, those outlets that are still competitive now will continue with web as the primary means of distribution, but with legacy branding from when they were primarily pulp or broadcast.”
Is 
To anyone who is aware of the changes going on in the mainstream media right now, there are very few surprises in the report. Essentially, today’s journalists are required to do more with less time. The resulting pressure has increased their reliance on material provided by communications professionals. 
