Roy Greenslades decision to leave the National Union of Journalists after 30 years has highlighted the painful change the print media and journalism is going through in adapting to the new media world. The NUJ are 'rubbishing' Web 2.0 and 'citizen journalism'.
Check out e-Consultancy for their take on the subject.
Also see Jeff Jarvis's comments in his blog.
Much of the discussion reminds me of the shouts of pain from IT mainframe people in the early 1980s where they saw their world being threatened by PCs and ‘non IT professionals’. They fought – and lost – the battle to keep computing in the hands of their ‘closed shop’. They made dire predictions of the world ending as untrained and unqualified people messed up data and destroyed corporate IT systems by using PCs and software like Microsoft and Lotus. We all know what happened.
Co-existance but with a power adjustment. PCs are everwhere but mainframes and their successors are still important.
The end of print media. I hope not. There is a place for in-depth journalism but citizen journalism is here to stay.
(Disclosure: I worked for Lotus from 1984 – 1990)