Four Roles for the New Journalist

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggests four roles that journalists may find themselves playing in the world of Web journalism, in a post by Alfred Hermida (Reportr.net, Feb. 2008).

They include authenticator, sense-maker, navigator and forum-leader. Journalists have always been authenticators and sense makers. They were navigators and forum leaders too, except that readers were only able to observe where they navigated and have their forums around their dinner tables with their family and friends, and without the presence of the forum leading journalist.

What has changed is the journalist's presence in the lives of his/her audience, and the audience's ability to navigate a good deal of the information the journalists used to keep to themselves, and then talk about it with the journalist.

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Project for Excellence in Journalism

And David Pogue writes this about organizations taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies.