Do publishers value journalists, or do they simply see them as machines to generate undifferentiated content. Mike Magee – a journalist and publisher who is always entertaining and never short of an opinion – has blasted publishers in a recent TechEye article. He highlights one “very senior journalist” whose job description is now Senior Data Gatherer.
Clearly with the intense pressure on print costs, and the simplistic “more pages are better” approach that many have taken to their websites, in some areas we have seen a drop in the quality of journalism. Personally I believe that the days of driving high volumes of traffic by mechanically reproducing the contents of press releases are coming to an end. I hope that both readers and search engine algorithms will soon be rewarding high-quality original content with more and more traffic, and we’ll see a recovery in the value of good journalists. If not, we could be heading to a future with very dull B2B media!
