So now you want me to take video?

So goes the lament from the mainline print reporter. Let me do what I'm good at...writing. Don't make me take pictures, too. Shoot video, no less.

I point out this piece, "You Must be Streaming," from New York Magazine because it addresses just this moment in journalistic history. And in the writer's view, any journalist brings tools to the table that no amateur can match, regardless of how rough the beginnings. Writer Kurt Andersen:

Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs in the best old-fashioned sense.

Calling this a "flux moment," writer Andersen notes how differently The New York Times and the Washington Post are handling their video effort and packaging. At NYT, the two newsrooms are merged; at Washpost, still separated. Times highlights its daily offerings, Post buries under a hard-to-find button, Andersen argues.

The article looks at an emerging video journalist from each newspaper, the Times' David Carr (with Carpetbagger blog and video, shown tripping over red carpets as he does his reporting), and WP's Travis Fox, the globetrotting one-man-band who never appears in his own videos. Two worth watching as the new medium, Web video by newspapers, emerges.

Anderson's point is to highlight this very moment, when it is all up for grabs.

The passionate, improvised, innovative reinventings, as opposed to the final, fully professionalized reinventions, are often the coolest moments in cultural history. Think of movies in 1920, TV in 1955, or public radio in 1980. ... And this very moment, before anyone professes to know much more than anyone else, is probably the beginning of the new medium’s great golden age. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Thanks to Sacred Facts for the tip to this piece.

The "E" words

I keep hearing two words here at Stanford, and finally decided to put them together. One of the words is "entrepreneurial," and the other is "emergent."

Shortly after arriving here, I learned this university is decentralized and you are on-your-own to learn everything you can about its riches, which are considerable. OK, I was up for that.

Then, very quickly, you are told that this school is an entrepreneurial place. If you like an idea, get out there and do it. Want something to happen? Do it. This is the home of the Silicon Valley start-up, and Stanford students talk about their impending "start ups" as if that is an expected and natural progression in life. Being entrepreneurial is highly valued.

That slides into our new life on the Internet, don't you think? People are starting blogs and wikis and personal web pages and online businesses. And the only way you learn how to do this is to jump in and do one.

Now, for emergent. This is about how things are changing right in front of us.

Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts...And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.

That came out of Steven Johnson's book, called "Emergence." I read it in Dan Gillmor's book, "We the media."

Tuck these two words into the back of your mind. They are defining our age. It's not really a time to be passive and let things happen to you. It's a time to jump in and get your feet wet in some html, some xml, some social tagging, some folksonomy and maybe try your hand at a video on iMovie.

I just saw former ADN journalist and freelancer Doug O'Harra's new work over at his Web site, Far North Science. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Go take a look. Then get entrepreneurial and emergent, and start something of your own!

Open source journalism: How's that work?

Frankly, the answer is yet to be discovered, but here's a place to check into some musing on it. Jay Rosen has launched a Web site dedicated to open source reporting, called newassignment.net. He plans to test out how professionals would work with amateurs to report news. He makes the distinction that these amateur pieces are not op-eds, but the real deal, reporting.

How exactly will that work? He's trying to figure that out now by collecting information on open source reporting, and gearing up for a test story on elections and voting experiences. Check out his Web site. There you can find a short 6-minute video of him talking about his project. And, you can even sign up to be a contributor.

Or, you can listen to a talk he gave at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society last November. The talk was called "open source journalism" and you can find it here. He talks and takes questions on his idea for about an hour and 20 minutes. (I download these into my music player and go walking in the hills, pondering the future of our work.)

One idea that emerges from it is that professional journalists will use amateurs as "smart mob" contributors to their stories. His example was the two or three reporters assigned to cover pharmaceuticals for a newspaper in New Jersey. Your source list could include a "smart mob" of people who work for the pharmaceuticals, spouses of those who work there, former workers there...etc etc. If you could put out a call for this audience to tell you what they know, you would learn more than if you were relying on your traditional sources and yourself to cover the industry.

The reporter rakes in all this info and then starts to work with it. Fact checking and corroboration are a big part of this process, according to Rosen. You may already know of Rosen's New York University Web site, Pressthink.