Several posts picked up on my "gateway" analogy (this is what I get for 
posting before I've finished my morning coffee). I didn't mean to suggest an 
end to the gatekeeper role, or that journalists will ever be a clear glass 
into the infoscape, unmuddied by prejudice, misguided assumptions or 
corporate priorities.

But having spent years as a wire editor on a midsized daily, I know that you 
put in print maybe 5 percent of everything that flows across your screen. 
What you screen out essentially does not get delivered to the readers of 
your publication. In an online world, however, that information is out 
there. Web denizens have many routes to it. My role as a journalist then is 
to find the needles in the infoglut haystack, to point the way to the source 
documents, to provide original content and to guide the user's way to meet 
his/her info needs.

Maybe a journalist stands somewhere between the vast uncharted seas of 
webinfo and the keyword-search engines of the Yahoos. I'd like to think 
there remains room for wetware intelligence, and that's where an online 
journalist comes in. Since we're inventing a new medium we can feel free to 
invent a new journalist too. We shouldn't visit the sins of print/broadcast 
journalists on the nascent H.L. Menkens of the eworld.

I'd love to hear more about the ecology paradigm for webspace.

Michael Hallinan
USA Today Online
www.usatoday.com
mhallina@usatin.gannett.com

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End of online-news-digest V1 #576
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