Can 'new media' actually improve journalism?

That was the provocative question raised today by students in a Masters Journalism program at the University of Oregon.

It turns out the procession of guest experts who'd preceded me to the classroom had left the students with the impression that 'new media' was killing journalism.

While there can be no doubt that competition from new media outlets and new media formats (online, mobile) are eroding the audience share of 'old media', it does not follow that new media is harming journalism. It may only be that it is harming the job security of traditional journalists.

In fact, it is possible that new media tools can significantly forward the principles of journalism for anyone willing to embrace these tools and technologies. Here are a few examples:

Aggregation
TheMoneyMeltdown.com is a great example of the use of aggregation to create a central location for information on a subject. The web site's creator didn't need to be the expert that wrote every article about our current economic meltdown - the value he performed was to go out and locate the best information about each aspect of the current economic crisis and aggregate all that content together in one well-organized web site. That a new-media application of one of journalism's oldest tenets: start with good research, then organize the information in a way that's useful to the audience.

Mash-ups
Data is everywhere, but data alone has no meaning. It once took reporting teams months to pour over data to give it meaning and then report the results. Mash-ups are a new-media tool for taking vast quantities of data, and empowering the public to be able to access the data easily to find out information they need. Chicagocrime.org pioneered this work way back in 2005, taking huge piles of crime data and making it searchable by location. The folks behind that initial project have since expanded their application to include location-based news stories, and also expanded to about a dozen cities with their application EveryBlock.com.

Audience Engagement
For too long, journalism has been a one-way conversation with the audience. Reporters report, readers read, and that's the way it's been.

New media tools make it possible for journalists to engage in a dialogue with the audience, which can make stories better from beginning to end. ReadWriteWeb has a great article detailing four ways they use Twitter to improve story-telling: Discovering breaking news; soliciting suggestions for interview questions for upcoming stories; quality assurance (readers catching/reporting errors), and even (gasp) promoting their stories so that their journalism reaches the largest possible audience.

Multi-Media storytelling
Perhaps the most exciting of all the advances offered by new media tools is the opportunity to provide a richer, more in depth and more compelling rendering of the most important stories of the day. The ability to richly interweave text, images, video, mapping and other media elements transforms yesterday's print or TV report into a powerful multimedia experience.
My favorite example of this is the excellent online multimedia report on the Minneapolis bridge collapse put together by a team at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, called 13 seconds in August. This is the 'New Media' equivalent of a long-form TV documentary, or a newspaper 'special section' - but frankly, is far more compelling. The ST team spent four months creating this compelling mix of mapping, images, text, video and audio.

We should all be encouraged by the possibilities of what journalism can become if we look at the new media tools as just that - new tools to continue the tradition of journalistic excellence.