There is a common misconception about journalists and crowdsourcing. Most people believe that it’s either black or white and that there’s no gray zone. And I usually quickly reply that of course there is a gray zone. We’re all in this gray zone if you wish. The main difference between a normal human being and a journalist is simply the salary. Of course this is not entirely true but you get the point. A journalist is just a normal human being who gets paid to report news. That’s his job and he’s paid for it. We can’t say that all human beings are automatically journalists but a lot of them have some interest in this field. A lot of people have journalistic talent but are not journalists. That’s probably why so many people blog.

My own definition of a journalist is someone who brings something forward in order to expose it (for good or evil). So are bloggers journalists? Yes. Are journalists bloggers? Not always!

Journalists need to move their profession to another level. There is a very famous book (Journalism 2.0) by Mark Briggs and I invite every one to read it. By the way, the book was released under the Creative commons license so it’s free. Journalists can’t drop everything and “move online” as there’s nowhere to go now but this is about to change.

I believe that “the journalist job” is going to radically change within a few years. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it will disappear but I fear the number of journalists will decrease over the next decade. Why? First of all, information wants to be free. I haven’t paid in years for a newspaper and I’m not the only one. My parents are still reading newspapers but I believe it will be harder and harder to sell those to the upcoming “always connected” generation. The concept of news papers is also dying in this lighting speed age. Why buy something that was printed “hours” ago when you can get up to the minute RSS feeds on your iPhone? See where this is going? Sure, we’ll still need journalists to write articles but who’s going to pay them? It’s sad to say but I doubt the current model will last for very long. It’s broken and we need to fix it.