Welcome to our new weekly segment: Letter From the Editor. While it may seem a bit cliché in that every magazine has one of these.. I decided that I had important things to say about everything from social media to fashion and beauty, and what better platform to put these viewpoints out there then in our blog section! So here goes collegiette’s..
When Clay Shirky, writer, consultant and lecturer, talks about how internet has given us the “many to many” pattern, he is simply saying that all types of groups of people can have a conversation at the same time. This simply could not happen through the phone or through the television. Internet allows us to communicate with millions of people through the typing of just a few words or the clicking of a mouse. Kind of like this new segment I have started up. By the way I must tell you that I am hoping that both this segment and our branch of HC can help to create their own conversation with millions of people, and continue to do so in the future, fingers crossed.
Now off the topic of jobs and becoming a serious adult, let’s get back to the idea of citizen journalism. Many public news forums allow for regular citizens to upload news content that to be quite honest about, they may have simply just stumbled upon and taped or taken a picture of on their smart phone. They then are considered to be somewhat of a journalist, although they may not even have formal schooling or training as a journalist in an academic or professional sense.
Ladies’ Home Journal is one of these publications using the power of citizen journalism to their benefit. A 128-year-old magazine such as this will be the first major mass-market magazine to rely almost solely on their subscribers for its content. In its March issue, Ladies’ Home Journal will begin to rely on their readers to publish content from things like parenting to health and beauty. They are using the site DivineCaroline.com to garner most of their articles for the spring issue. In the Media Decoder section of the New York Times journalist, Jennifer Preston, analyzes the logistics a bit more than I’m willing to do at this very moment.
[pagebreak]
The issue for me lies in this though, the jobs of the editors of LHJ will then primarily consist of fact-checking. As I know first hand, I myself am editor of this online branch of Her Campus, that fact-checking is a huge responsibility of an editor, I would not be happy that the bulk of my job has been taken from me. As for me, this would not be something that would settle lightly. I think most of the fun is in assigning projects and articles to your highly qualified writers, editing them and determining how they get published in the end. With the changes in who is writing and uploading content, some of these tasks would then disappear.
What do you think? Any of my fellow editing aficionados out there have an opinion on the matter? I guess in the end you’ve got to ask yourself, are you ready to roll with the punches and embrace social media and technology for what it is or are you going to live in the stone age in a forever state of perpetual denial? I guess you’ll have to just join the debate and pick a side in the end. I’m deciding to roll with the punches, and although that might be the best thing for me, it might not be under your comfort level at the moment.. It really is a debate for society and time will eventually tell who wins in the end..
C’est la vie my fellow journalists