Ultimately, people are going to judge for themselves whether each individual piece of content on the Web is journalism or not journalism, so I don’t think it’s worth our energy to try and categorize it all.

However, I don’t think it’s a rhetorical question or debate – there are a lot of people who don’t see how journalism in a new medium is still journalism, and I think that part of the transition we as a society and as an industry are going through is making that mental gear-change.

(Disclosure: For those who don’t know me, I’m also acquainted with current and former P-I employees. SeattlePI.com has also linked out to my company’s site a few times, if that matters.)

I enjoyed your post, Jason, but can we just scrap the whole “what’s journalism?” thing (asking this openly and rhetorically to everyone)? Who cares? I still visit SeattlePI.com; so do a lot of other people. SeattlePI.com provides original accounts of events that happened and links to original accounts of events that happened. Is it reliable? Is it trustworthy? We’re on the Internet here — quality and truth rise to the top.

Look, any of us who read the P-I (in print or online) before it went online only know damn well that a lot of people were asking “is this journalism?” back then, too. Frankly, if those people don’t like it, they can go read the Times. (Oddly, many of them keep coming back.)

I don’t think anyone doubts that the P-I is trying to put out a news product. Sure, maybe a few people visit the site less often because there’s less original content, but if what the P-I is doing can make money and sustain the product, that’s a win.

For the record, I visit SeattlePI.com just as often as I did when the print product existed.

I agree with@ dw though and had a massive redesign in mind after reading in the farewell letter that “the new seattlepi.com is an innovative experiment and I think that the eyes of the country and this industry are going to be on what we do in Seattle.”

http://disaster.seattlepi.nwsource.com/articles/403793.html

Yes it’s a new enterprise, but it’s one in which they are actively trying to draw parallels to the old enterprise, rely on the power of the old brand, bring traditionally dead-tree readers to the web, and rest on the authority of a paper product that no longer exists. Breaking from that would probably lose them more credibility than they would gain.

I think the changes should and will come in incremental changes. The front page already looks different than it did six months ago, and I think the slow-morph process is the way to go for a mass-media publication in most cases.

And I really do think this is the time to go big. I have a secret list of firms and designers I’d love to see given the opportunity to rethink pi.com. At some point I’ll share them.

“Yes, the SeattlePI is still practicing journalism BUT only because they are still self-producing content that is both original and interpretations of existing content.”

It’s the larger extrapolation we disagree on.

How do you stay relevant when anyone can publish their own site and go directly to the public? How do you ensure that you can house the discussions that sprout up around the thing these community leaders write?

When you can no longer count on economics to hold your relevancy monopoly…I think it was smart of the P-I to snag these household names before they realized that they didn’t need the P-I to reach the public.

Rikin – I think you’re right that we’re all more or less on the same page here.

I think you and I may disagree on the value of intelligent aggregation though. I don’t think you need to re-write something for your actions to be journalism. I think that’s an accidental artifact of the old system whereby journalists could avoid plagiarism and still cover the same information as others.

If you’ve written something fantastic, there’s no reason that me rewriting it (unless, for some reason, I could create an almost objectively better account of it) would be anything but a waste of time for the reader. When accessing your site and your story is as easy as clicking a link, I’m acting in the best interest of the reader by sending them straight over.

I think that at the moment it’s weird to think of a collection of links as journalism, but if it is intelligently culled, I think it’s journalism. Best example I can think of: Romenesko.

I think that the work of writing original content (classical journalism) will become superdistributed between tens or hundreds of thousands of “prosumer” writers, and the high-visibility portals will practice journalism with a much larger amount of link-management.

Is that different than what journalism was? Yes. Does it still deserve to be called journalism? I think so.

The PAST of journalism was aggregation. Stop arguing semantics — if journalism didn’t have aggregation as a core element, there never would have been an AP or UPI. Every newspaper or news website is a combination of original material, wire copy, and syndicated material. No newspaper in this country is 100% original material.

As was noted recently, as much as 50% of a newspaper website comes from wire services. Saying that the Seattle Times “is” journalism while seattlepi.com “isn’t” is like using those USDA rules to determine what is and isn’t ham.