Louis Freedberg writes:
It’s not often that I get choked up reading an e-mail message from a fellow journalist.
But that’s what happened when I got a message from Pedro Rojas, executive editor of La Opinion, the Spanish language daily in Los Angeles.
I had asked him whether we could share the Spanish translation that La Opinion had given us of California Watch’s story on homeland security with other papers that were going to run the story the next day.
“Go ahead,” Pedro wrote. “We should learn to share in time of challenges.”
The rest of Freedberg's note (posted to the blog of the Center for Investigative Journalism) is well worth a read.
It's been fascinating to watch how journalism is responding to the rise of social media: After a period of head-in-the-sand denial and contraction, journalists have started to leverage the power of Web 2.0 to take on the kind of investigative and enterprise stories that mainstream media are cutting. Reporters are launching new nonprofit projects, crowdsourcing research, and collaborating across organizations as well as linguistic, racial, social, and professional lines.
In the twenty-first-century, it seems, journalism will be shareable.