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What is Web 2.0 and why do (some) journalists fear it?

Friday | April 25, 2008 | 5:50 pm  

I thought the guys from the O’Reilly Insight Group did a really good job of sum­ming up what “Web 2.0″ is:

• Lis­ten­ing – To your cus­tomers, read­ers, part­ners, etc.
• Par­tic­i­pa­tion – Join­ing into the con­ver­sa­tions and rela­tion­ships that those folks are having, and let­ting them par­tic­i­pate in your con­ver­sa­tions and relationships.
• Trans­parency – Open­ing your­self up, being honest about mistakes
• Ongo­ing inquiry – Con­tin­u­ally asking your audi­ence about what they’re look­ing for from you, ways to improve, etc.

Don’t those four points sound an awful lot like things that are core to journalism?

• Lis­ten­ing – To your sources, to your readers.
• Par­tic­i­pa­tion – Pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion to create better par­tic­i­pants in a democ­racy. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in the soci­ety via an Op/Ed page.
• Trans­parency – Isn’t it every journalist’s goal to make as much of the public and pri­vate sec­tors trans­par­ent to the com­mu­nity they serve?
• Ongo­ing inquiry – Beat report­ing, inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. We are an indus­try of ongo­ing inquiries.

So if “Web 2.0″ and jour­nal­ism are so sim­i­lar, then why are so many jour­nal­ists afraid or hos­tile toward “2.0″ fea­tures on their Web site and “2.0″ sites in general?

I don’t have an answer, and the Web doesn’t need any more spec­u­la­tion, so I’ll just put that ques­tion out there and hope some smarter folks have answers.

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