Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

One other face-palm inducing stat that I pulled out of that PR Week study that was published last week:

Among the total respondents, the use of blogs and social networks for research increased significantly in 2010 as compared to 2009; however this spike appears to be skewed by online magazine/news reporters and bloggers. While 91% of bloggers and 68% of online reporters “always” or “sometimes” use blogs for research, only 35% of newspaper and 38% of print magazine journalists suggested the same.

This divergence was also seen when using social networks for research. Overall, 33% of respondents indicated using such assets, but blogger usage (48%) was greater than newspaper (31%) and print magazine (27%).

The emphasis is mine. That figure is mindbogglingly low. Lets flip that around, almost two-thirds of newspaper journalists don’t use blogs or social media when doing their research. I can’t think of many beats where you wouldn’t do some research on blogs or social media. More importantly, print and magazine journalists, need to realize one fact;  your stories are going online. There’s even a chance that your stories are being read by more people online than in print. Whether you like it or not you might just be an online journalist. Maybe it’s time to start acting like one.

Update: Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis also expressed his doubts over the iPad.

It’s too limiting,  places too many shackles on sharing, mixing, and content creation. And for what? Pretty pictures and some video? Really?

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It’s made both the cover of Newsweek and Time, taken over my Twitter stream and gotten every tech/media/internet geek out there in a froth. And while the iPad might be a gorgeous device that does lots of cool and fun things, gaming is going to be a blast on that thing, there’s a group of media pundits out there that don’t think Jobs’ Jesus tablet will do much for the media.

Of course if you want to see glowing praise for the iPad you can check out this round-up of reviews on Wired.

Jose Antonio Vargas at Huffington Post sees it as desperate delusion borne out of a salvation mentality. Media needs someone, something to save them. Why not the iPad?

“What we’re seeing is a desperate wish — the last gasp of desperation. Editors and publishers and advertisers want to regain control of the media experience that the Internet took away from them. In their minds, this iPad is the magic pill that will make all of this Internet crap go away. Surely, it won’t,” Jeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and author of What Would Google Do? told me in a phone interview. Upon reading that Time magazine is charging $5 a month for its iPad app, Jarvis tweeted Friday morning: “Mag iPad prices are delusional: In no form, even engraved in gold, is Time is worth $5/issue.” Jarvis followed it up with this tweet, linking to a story in paidContent: “if Time’s iPhone app is free & iPhone apps work on iPad, why would I pay $5 for an iPhone app? Naked newsmakers?”

Kevin Charman-Anderson on the Strange Attractor blog looks at the price and strategies for some apps on the iPad (hint: they’re more expensive) and calls shenanigans. He notes that the WSJ iPad app is a whopping $17.99 a month. A weekly online subscription sets you back $1.99. I’ll let the sheer lunacy of that sink in.

MarketWatch’s John Dvorak agrees that old media is expecting way too much from the iPad and, more importantly, calls out traditional media outlets for swooning over the device:

The reviews came out this week for a device the public will buy on Saturday. We see these written up by Apple’s hand-selected core of tech journalists who are known to be friendly to the company and soft with reviewing its products.

It’s the usual suspects plus the emergence of the two major news weeklies, Time and Newsweek, to out-and-out promote the iPad as the future of, uh, well, everything!

No mention that their future will be dependent on the success of the device.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt also takes a jab at old media and their almost unquestioning devotion to the iPad:

The media has been making a huge deal about how the iPad is supposed to “save the business,” because suddenly everything will return to apps, and people pay for apps, and toss in a big dose of “Steve Jobs!” and there’s some sort of magic formula which includes some question marks and inevitably ends in profit! Now, the iPad does look like a nice device, and I have no doubt that it will do quite well for Apple, and many buyers will be quite happy with it. But it’s not going to save the media business in any way, shape or form. It’s just the media chasing a rainbow in search of gold that doesn’t exist.

I’m going to leave the last word to Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, because I’m sure he’d want it that way. To him the iPad is not unlike AOL and multimedia enhanced CD-Roms. Anybody remember those?

Always helpful, Barack Obama helps a young girl during the 2009 White House Easter Egg hunt. From the White House Flickr feed.

A lot of people got taken aback by a PR Week study that showed that 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists. I can see some people wringing their hands about this.

“Bloggers don’t have standards. They don’t have a code of ethics. Who are they beholden to?,” the naysayers will say.

But if anything, I see this great blogger/journalism explosion as an amazing opportunity for journalism and the media itself, here’s a few ways old-school media can take advantage of this.

1) Give more people a voice

Think of this mass of bloggers as a very engaged, very excited crowd. Take the opportunity to find interesting voices, unique voices and give them a big platform. Many bloggers would be happy for a bigger soapbox.

2) Lead the way

There is a massive wealth of journalism expertise in your average newsroom and journalism school. Engage bloggers and citizen journalists. Show them why accuracy, objectivity, research are important. Even better show them how to do this. A progressive non-profit or j-school could get some good press putting together a how-to package for bloggers looking to add a bit of credibility to their blogs.

3) The power of the network

Hypothetical scenario: You’re a national news website (or a newspaper) and you’re covering an election but there’s no way that you can have enough journalists to cover an entire country (or state for that matter). Engage bloggers to be on-the-ground correspondents to help you do this work. The results might not be perfect but in the right hands can be molded into something compelling and readable.

My former colleague Sarah Millar wrote about the study as well and tries to unpack the blogger/journalist dichotomy.

If you’ve been checking out my Sunday Image blog posts regularly you’ll notice that the Flickr Commons is one of my favourite sources. The Flickr Commons is a great resource if you’re into vintage photography. It invites institutions with large photo archives (museums, libraries, national archives, etc.) to upload parts of their collections to Flickr so the public can access them.

From time to time the museum crowdsources for annotations on photographs. So when a museum curator is unsure where a photo was taken they ask the crowd. Sometimes the crowd comes back with great and very accurate responses.

I’m also going to give a very jaunty tip of the hat to the blog Indicommons which explores the growing Flickr Commons by pointing out interesting content and new additions. I will also note that one of the editors of the Indicommons blog is Toronto editor and fellow book nerd Stephanie Fysh.

Photo: Possum with camera. From the Australian War Memorial Collection.