But is it true?

Interesting report from Harvard's Nieman foundation for journalism this quarter, provocatively entitled "Goodbye Gutenberg". Mathew Ingram picks up many of the highlights, particularly,

"To paraphrase Andy Warhol, in the future everyone will be a journalist for 15 minutes. When crime victims can post wrenching accounts of assaults (and accompanying photos of bruises) and politicians bypass the press with Web-based campaigns, then the role journalists traditionally play is being usurped."

Which seems to me a slightly warped interpretation on the part of the Nieman foundation as to what journalism is, or is for. Reporting the facts...sure. The people involved in the events may be able to do that, "usurping" journalists.

But is their version true (or fair, or verifiable)? The web is vast. Much of it is biased, erroneous or satirical. If everyone can report the news for 15 minutes - and with 57 million blogs it seems as if a fair number of us are having a go - there are enough competing, subjective viewpoints to confuse any reader. The unique selling point for news organisations, so long as they can maintain their reputation for distinguishing fact from fiction, is stronger than ever in this context.

Which makes the recent decision by Le Monde to run a front-page promotion that looks like an article (What'sNext) more foolish than I think anyone has realised. This isn't just a matter of journalistic ethics (about which I am unqualified to comment). This is a matter of commercial sense (about which I am).

Some newspaper owners are openly operating what Michael Porter calls a "harvesting strategy", converting, as Philip Meyer tells us, the reputation of their brands into short-term profits. Previously, that has merely been an issue of culling the newsroom and paring back the quality of journalism to the barest bones (though even at 16 the Express newsroom may be overstaffed - how many people does it really take to pen a daily reminder that ten years ago a princess was alive but now she's dead?). Le Monde's decision to run advertising as editorial goes a stage further than this. If journalism is not to be disintermediated by the ability of anyone with a laptop or a mobile phone to tell a story, it need to hold on to its unique selling point - being trusted to tell us what is true.