A great line from Alexandre Gamela thinking about Lisa Williams’ Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry post:

[F]iring journalists doesn’t lead to an increase in newspaper competitivity, it just increases the number of competitors, since a single journalist can create it’s own media, and shadow the company who fired him.

A good point and one that a lot of people should and are embracing

My first reaction was to also wholeheartedly agree with his point of clarification that journalism is not a hi-tech industry.

[T]he problem with journalism nowadays is that uses a technology that is accessible to the rest of the people

But on reflection I may need a bit of pursuading

User friendly

One of the problems with a lot of hi-tech is that it’s hard to use and seems to be have made by people who have no idea of how the rest of us use things. I often ask myself if the people who make software actually use the stuff. In that sense the journalism industry has a similar problem - it is apart. Journalists are somehow different from the ‘rest of the people’ who use this ‘technology’.

When I’m talking to students about the web I often allude to the idea of poacher turned gamekeeper. As a consumer, there are a number of great things about the web and some pretty crappy things and its a good idea to try and hold on to that when you cross over to become a publisher. But often they don’t.

But it seems pretty clear that keeping the connection between what you consume and what you produce is vital to staying in the game.