*News is people - in all its forms

“Journalists will need as many skills for telling stories for other people as for telling stories they generate themselves,” says Daniel Meadows of the changing world of media in the digital age.

I struggle to see a clear difference between these two categories. In the immortal words of Harold ‘Soundbite’ Evans, “News is people.” The stories journalists generate have always been about and for people. That is the core of journalism. As far as I can tell, the difference between then and now is only the range of tools and platforms that journalists can employ to do this.

To the soundtrack of (repeated) cries from the Newspaper Diploma students of, “Is there a future for professional print journalists?” Meadows says, “Video didn’t kill the radio star. All these things can work in parallel.”

Exactly. So while Meadows’s brilliant digital storytelling movement, Capture Wales, may be one of the few examples of a real “electronic embrace”, surely such truly interactive media are destined to work alongside, and not instead of, more reactive and traditional media?

Why then does Meadows brand so-called interactivity such as pressing red buttons on remote controls, phone-voting and comment-posting as “tokenism” and “cynical”? Because it “doesn’t need the controller to let go of the reins”?

If the controller let go of the reins completely and always, wouldn’t that be tantamount to the death of the proverbial radio star, the occurrence of which Meadows was himself so quick to dismiss?