Last night I was talking with my disillusioned journalist friend Aidan about the staff cuts that just hit a couple of newspapers, and how many older reporters left, and how much more than just bodies the newspapers lost. With all these newspaper buy-outs, lay-offs and walk-outs goes massive amounts of institutional knowledge.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and there’s a simple solution to keep reporters’ brains “on file.” It’s called a wiki. Reporters could be asked to write on a wiki about the people, relationships, places, events, and businesses that mattered to them and the stories they told.
Reading back on that last ‘graf, I can see reporters asking “Why would I want to do more work just so my employer can have less work to do after I’m gone?” That’s a relevant question if these wikis are kept for internal use only — but if they’re out there, on the newspaper web site, for public consumption, then the wiki becomes a source of information for the community. The wiki also becomes an information “anchor” that can harness people who are also interested and / or smart on that particular beat.
[Update] Thinking about this over the weekend, this institutional-knowledge drain doesn’t apply to only newspaper journalists (duh), and the wiki idea doesn’t just work for newspaper-dot-coms. Any time a television news reporter or local radio journalist leaves their employer, they take with them a body of local knowledge that could take years to replace.
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