Global Neighbourhoods: Terry Heaton on the transformation of news & journalism

Terry Heaton, the Digital Journalist, has a wonderful, deep-thinking and lengthy column about traditional and new news coverage, about media and the divisions in society, about traditional media and their selections of topics as news,about callous celebrity interviewers who only stick to the script. It's also about why prominent people use social media to speak for themselves rather than through the jaded and selfish filters of traditional media.

For those of you suffering from Twitter-inseminated short attention span, tak a pill or something. Shttp://digitaljournalist.org/issue0708/heaton0708.htmlpend 15 minutes reading the entire column. It's worth your time.

For those of you who cannot, here's a brief sample:

"And that's precisely the point for Mr. Wise and for all of us in the
world of news. It isn't about the story; it's about us and our careers
and our fame and our fortune. It's about furthering the establishment,
and this is precisely why people are taking things into their own
hands. The audience is dissatisfied, but we are unable to turn away
from fostering that dissatisfaction.

The personal media revolution and its inexpensive tools are enabling
people to cover what's important to them for themselves. Another
significant event the last week in June should give everybody in the
all-things-to-everybody crowd a severe case of the spine chills."

I don't know much about Terry, or about this online publication. You can't subscribe to it. There's a neat little (c) at the bottom of his column. But, as I've said before, it's not the medium that matters, it's the message, and his is both accurate and articulate in its delivery.