Business journalism, blogging and reading

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon looks in a Friday blog post at the future of business journalism and how blogging and the Internet are changing it.

Salmon writes, “Financial journalists know better than most how tight the journalism job market really is: in my field, demand for good journalists vastly exceeds supply. I get asked on a weekly basis if I can recommend someone for this or that job. And normally the answer is that no, I can’t: pretty much everybody’s taken already. The result is that journalists are getting poached on a regular basis, and salaries are rising impressively: we live in a world where Dennis Kneale has reportedly been pulling down $500,000 a year.

“The fact is that a huge universe of great material is being published every day, by old media and new media alike. And increasingly, tools like Twitter are doing a good job of helping the public find the really good stuff. It might be a smaller percentage of the whole than we’re used to, and there might even be less of it on an absolute basis than there was in the past. But there’s much more great journalism available to the average member of the population than there ever used to be. In the olden days, if you didn’t get the NYT or the WaPo, you didn’t read their journalism. Nowadays, when they publish something great, you read it. Just like when Gawker publishes something great. Or Yahoo blogs. Or some guy in Australia with a blogspot account who can move a stock 20% overnight by sheer force of argument alone.

“Still, the biggest thing that’s missing in the journalistic establishment is people who are good at finding all that great material, and collating it, curating it, adding value to it, linking to it, presenting it to their readers. It’s a function which has historically been pushed into a blog ghetto, and which newspapers and old media generally have been pretty bad at. And of course old media doesn’t understand blogs in the first place, let alone have the confidence or the ability to incorporate such thinking into everything they do.

“Think about it this way: reading is to writing as listening is to talking — and someone who talks without listening is both a boor and a bore. If you can’t read, I don’t want you in my newsroom. Because you aren’t taking part in the conversation which is all around you.”

Read more here.