Changing Field of Journalism has Pitfalls, Rewards

Summary

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It's a humbling and exciting time to be a journalist. Humbling because journalists are no longer the prime purveyors of information, and exciting because technology lets us tell stories in glamorous new ways. For example, if readers of the magazine I work for are interested in a gorgeous home we feature, they can hold their smartphones up to a thingy that looks like a cross between an Aztec symbol and a barcode. They'll be whooshed to a glossy video of the designer taking them on a room-by-room tour via their phones.

At times in the past few years I've wondered if I'm riding a dinosaur to extinction. Even my title, "articles editor," sounds quaint; colleagues in similar jobs are "content managers," terminology I at first mocked because I didn't get it. Now I'm beginning to understand. First of all, journalists don't get to define what's news any longer. It isn't just the facts, ma'am, but photos on Flickr, comments on Facebook, customer reviews on Amazon.com, Rush Limbaugh's bluster and NPR's yak about yak farmers in the Himalayas. As Jeff Jarvis commented recently on buzzmachine.com, tweets about movies that appear to be idle chat "add up to valuable content: a predictor of movie box office that's 97.3 percent accurate."

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Changing Field of Journalism has Pitfalls, Rewards

Perhaps in part because of such crossover from content to commerce, the line between editorial and advertising - once as rigid as separat...

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