Maestro PR Blog: Journalists, Journalism and Keeping Up With the Websters

The old saying of “keeping up with the Jones” is obsolete if you spend any amount of time on the Internet.   Today, we need to be talking about keeping up with the Websters, those people who live on the web and seem to know all its ins and outs.  It’s a phrase that embodies the frantic pace imposed by the Web in general and email, RSS feeds, electronic newsletters, daily/weekly and monthly business communication updates, search engines, Twitter, LinkedIn, and, yes, even spam, in particular.  

Put  aside the amount of time it takes to weed out spam and to check the spam filter.  It takes a massive amount of time just to wade through the information you need to work on now, let alone keeping up with the news you need just to stay on top of your game in your field, career and home.

It used to be impolite to say how busy you are and leverage that as an excuse for not staying in touch with someone.  Now it’s a common conversation starter.  The litany of things to do on the web or because of the web has become the Internet Age’s answer to keeping up with the Jones.  It’s no longer a matter of how many ‘things’ you own.  It’s a game of who is busier, who receives more emails, and who has more to do – all on the web, of course.  Those who are the busiest and know the most websites for finding any tidbit of information are the “Web-sters” (or, “Websters”).   Need information about the latest semiconductor market statistics, packaging advancements, company collaborations?  The Websters know it.  Want to find out if the H1-Ni /swine-flu vaccine is safe?  Ask the Websters.  They can give you a site and summarize the warnings.  Need a site to help your kid do his/her homework?  The Websters already used it and their kid got an “A” on his paper.   Want to share your latest knitting or crocheting project?  The Websters know it and can tell you how many people are on the site and who has posted over 100 of her projects of wearable art.  This list can go on and on, but it’s too boring.

The point is this.  Everyone is so down on print and so up on the web that we may be in risk of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water.  The web is wonderful, but it is also overwhelming.  You can drown in useless stuff just as easily as drowning in the useful information.  And while the

Websters seem to have all the answers, you may have different questions.

This is where the need for journalists and journalism enters the picture.  Journalists have been aggregators of the news. Now, there is no aggregation – other than search engines with pages and pages of possible answers to your question.  And you have to sort them all out.  Or, you can rely on journalists to sort through the fluff and aggregate what is important to readers, and direct you to the information you need on the web.

Journalists are masters of identifying news stories that would otherwise be missed, or never brought to light.  We count on journalists to tell us when a company has been unethical or dishonest in its financial reporting or successful in creating a trend-setting market;  when a politician has over-stepped his boundary of expected behavior as a public official, or when the community is at risk and needs an alert, or when there is a community success story.

Journalists also find those obscure stories about topics we need to know but may not be searching for.

A Journalist Learns the Truth about Dry Wall.

A couple I know own a 3.5-year-old rental home.  One Saturday while the renters were out, the water pipe inside the wall of the second-storey bathroom broke. When the family returned home, the house was completed flooded. The water-logged dry wall boards of the entire house were bloated and ripped from their moorings; the furniture was ruined, and the house was completely unlivable. 

While still reeling from all the steps needed to make the house inhabitable again, our friend noticed an article on dry wall in the International Herald Tribune (www.iht.com or www.nyt.com/iht).  The story commented about health problems allegedly related to dry wall imported from China during the housing boom a few years back.  It was the kind of article you’d never look up on the web, unless you specifically needed to research dry wall.  (How many of us do that?)   The article alerted the couple to check the source of  materials that will be used when the home is remodeled and ensure that the materials are from reputable suppliers known for quality. 

Does anyone have time to do all this checking?  Not many of us do. But some journalist took the time to research a problem, write this story, and make this couple think about something they would’ve overlooked.

That’s one reason why we need journalists.

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Barbara Kalkis, Maestro Marketing & PR (sm)