PUBLIC MARKS from dggit with tags madmundolist & journalism

Personal Journalism is just as ethical as old-school public journalism. It still values facts, fairness, truth telling and good reporting. It’s just that personal journalism is written differently. It is written from one person, a person we can identify and identify with, for one person. The byline is more than a name under a headline in Personal Journalism. It is the persona and the personality. Personal journalists do more than report the story. They let us see at least a little about who they are, what they believe, what drives them and what they find important. If a personal journalist has a bias, we know it. That is part of the truth-telling tradition all journalists should endorse, but only personal journalists make it a practice. Personal Journalism is shareable because people like to share what has touched them in a direct, intimate way, be it a song, a video or a good story. Personal Journalists let other people help with the fact gathering or putting the facts in context, because Personal Journalism is part of a conversation, not a proprietary, walled garden. Personal journalists can be writers, recorders or picture takers, but for the sake of clarity, I’ve written the definition from a writer’s point of view. In the future, all journalists will be personal journalists. Within five to ten years, if you’re not a personal journalist, you will be out of work, and if your news organization hasn’t embraced personal journalism, it will be out of business. Well, that may be going a bit too far, because I’m not sure personal journalism is required of those who report for print or broadcast, but it is required of online journalists. So long as print survives, even in newsletters for the elderly and the elite, public journalism will survive. In the online world, personal journalism will be the only journalism people consistently seek.

A world for online journalists. Come all ye scribes, artists and innovators of the press.