Thank you for your post and your interest in the preliminary findings of the 1st Annual Middleberg/Society for New Communications Research Survey of Media in the Wired World.

Please allow me to address some of your questions and concerns:

You can download a full presentation of the data and findings here:
http://sncr.org/2008/11/18/symposium-proceedings-2008/

If you and your readers review this document, you will see that we do indeed report that 83% of the 30-49 year-old respondents believe that new media tools and technologies are enhancing journalism (as compared with 100% of 18-29 year-olds and 40% of 50-64 year olds)

You will also discover, that we not only asked respondents about the tools and technologies, but we also asked many questions about WHY they believed the tools were valuable and how they use them in their work.

In addition, we asked about their beliefs regarding the credibility of information found in a variety of social media, and specifically if they believed that citizen journalism represented a benefit to journalism.

As we have stated, this is an interim report. The survey is still open and available for all journalists to take at http://www.surveytracker.net/scripts/survey.dll?AHID=03100D . We hope many more journalists will share their thoughts with us via this survey.

Please also note that the second phase of the study, which we are embarking on now, is qualitative and will include interviews with journalists (from all types of media organizations, demographics/age groups). These will result in a variety of in-depth case studies. This combination of a quantitative and qualitative approach to the study will help us all to better understand the trends that are occurring in journalism today. (The full report will be complete and available from SNCR in Spring 2009.)

Thank you again for your interest in this study. We hope you and your readers will take the time to read the full presentation and the final report, when it is available, and again, we encourage any of your readers who are journalists to take the survey.

Best wishes and thank you for the opportunity to comment -

Jen McClure
Executive Director
Society for New Communications Research

Jen McClure’s last blog post..Proceedings from the 2008 SNCR Research Symposium

I will always go with the later.

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I wonder about your fear, “that we start to replace the truth with information.”

Philosophers have long wrestled over the meaning of “truth” with perhaps the prevailing opinion that there is no absolute truth, but only subjective truth. What might be true to a Christian might not be true to a Muslim, for example.

Conversely, information is a well-defined concept rooted in scientific principles. Information is absolute and reflects reality.

Given the limits of our brains’ abilities to interpret such information within the framework of subjective reality, people make the mistake of confusing truth with reality.

My fear would be the opposite: that we are trending to replace information with “truth”.

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