Look Ma, it’s me!
Innovation in College Media has an interview with me up right now if you want to find out more about what and how I think.
I will leave you with a small preview of the interview. This sums up what I think well:
And if you want to make journalism better — truly foment change — you have to believe there is no idea too crazy to succeed. Journalism needs dreamers. Journalism needs entrepreneurs. Journalism needs people willing to take big risks. The status quo will result in all of us losing our jobs.
And here is a little Q&A preview:
ICM: You mention that journalists need to “get and understand the Web.” Could you flesh that out a little more. Lots of students, for instance, know facebook, youtube, and the like. Is there something more to understanding “the Web”?
Thornton: It’s one of those things that if you need someone to show you how to do something or if you need to read a manual for something like YouTube or Blogger.com, you don’t really get the Web.
Anyone can use Facebook. We need people who have that entrepreneurial spirit — the people starting their own blogs, creating their own personal sites, etc. Making a MySpace page is nothing. Do you know some HTML and CSS? Can you FTP files to your site? That’s understanding the Web. And getting the Web means that you understand that the Web is an interconnected Web of people, cultures and civilizations.
Just because you can shoot video or make an audio slideshow, doesn’t mean you get that concept. Journalism needs people who understand that the Web is a community. That’s how we break out of this one-way communication paralysis in journalism. The Web allows everyone to have a voice, and many journalists — and journalism students — still don’t get that.