Mark Potts

February 19, 2009

Mark Potts came to George Mason University Tuesday as a guest speaker to Steve Klein’s electronic journalism class to talk to students about the future of Journalism. What it will hold for our generation and that after us. Potts, a revolutionary in the electronic journalism field along with many others emphasizes the death of newspapers and the rise of the Web 2.0 take over. His claim to fame was creating an electronic journalism site during the beginning stages of the internet. He and other revolutionaries did not know then, but they would change the face of the way people would enjoy news for many years to come.

Potts reported for The Washington Post for 15 years and then went on to co-found their website Washingtonpost.com, when the internet frenzy began to kick in at te turn of the new century. Potts also created his own blog called the Recovering Journalist, and on it he also describes that he “created and cofounded Backfence.com, the leading hyper-local user-generated citizens media company.” These feats help to summarize how he became a leader in the internet journalism field by contributing early on to the networking communities on the web.

“When I was in school you didn’t talk about the business of journalism.  We just did it the way it was always done,” Potts said. He has of course seen this kind of attitude towards journalism change over time. People can update news through podcasts, twitter, blogging, facebook, really anything that gets information from person to person nowadays is considered newsworthy. People are becoming their own reporters, gathering their own news, faster than reporters and journalists can. In fact, many reporters and journalists rely on the people, blogging to get quicker updates.
Journalism is changing rapidly and their now needs to be discussion on how to deal with these changes. Companies like AOL and USA TODAY, are using brand marketing, advertising and more community based internet journalism practices in order to draw in new reader bases. Potts calls the new outlook a “cataclysmic change.”

This change can be described by what he calls a “media perfect storm,” that will probably not allow for newspaper journalism to continue. Below are the factors that he described several factors that make up this storm:

1. The state of the economy right now
2. Online news is faster, cheaper and more convenient
3. The green movement has spurred people to use less paper

Already we have seen major layoffs in the media industry, starting with web hosts like AOL who were late on the broadband bandwagon and newspapers who have introduced furloughs (unpaid holidays for all employees)The future is approaching rapidly for the extinction of newspapers including cities already starting to dismiss them, even the giants are taking hits, like Gannett and Newscorp.

Potts believes that the future of journalism lies in Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  This means writing and designing for the web in such a way that is allows for easier ways to search for information on search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Software such as Omniture will allow people to monitor trends on the web. Basically, the future of journalism is now in the hands of the consumer, no longer that of executives or reporters.