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On the Road

After two fascinating days at the Nieman Narrative Journalism conference in Boston, I’m heading to SIME, the Scandinavian Interactive Media Event in Stockholm. Postings will be light until later on Monday.

The Nieman conference, where I spoke, was fascinating because of the quality of speakers, which was outstanding, but also because the gathering’s theme — that news must aspire to include the complexity of events, and that often, this is best accomplished by telling the stories of those affected — is so true. Journalism is above all about people.

This is why blogging and its digital relatives are so important to the future of media. It’s not that most bloggers are doing journalism — most aren’t — but rather that so many are telling their own stories, using democratized media tools in ways that have thrown open the gates and challenged the former gatekeepers.

The challenges for traditional journalists are enormous. But the potential — through welcoming, not fearing, the new voices — is even greater.

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