Guest lecture: Internet and Journalism

At a Dutch blog I write for, de Jaap, we were asked if we could give a guest lecture on ‘Online journalism’ at the ‘School of Journalism’ in the town of Zwolle here in the Netherlands. Together with Bert Brussen, Huub Bellemakers and Bart Nijman I travelled to Zwolle and we arranged a nice set (three) of guest lectures. I thought it would be nice to quickly translate the slides I made for my lecture and share them with you.

Of course some parts of this presentation may be unclear or may even appear as ‘untrue’, I hope in both these cases it is because you can’t hear which things I’m talking about while showing these slides. (Of course I would be happy to answer any questions, or indeed to give a similar lecture on request.) In any case, the main point is that with new and ongoing developments journalism as a field, like any field, has to ask itself ‘what is it that we’re doing?’ and ‘what is it that I’m offering’. This way you can get to where the roots of your field lie and how you can use the new opportunities one has to accomplish the main goals.

Quite often I find that online sources are dismissed, with the mean reason being that they’re online sources. I think that, as with any source, the question should be of reliability, not of origin instead. This does require some new skills for journalists, but fortunately it also offers them with far more information than ever before. My slides can be found on slideshare here, and this particular set is included below: