First Entry In The "I Am The Future Of Journalism" Contest: Daniel Bachhuber

The “I Am The Future Of Journalism Contest” has its first entry, and it’s awesome. Daniel Bachhuber is a journalism student at the University of Oregon, a photographer, web developer, member of CoPress, and a journalist with a compelling vision of the future:

Here’s the text of Daniel’s entry:

There are three important themes I’d like to convey with my response, if they aren’t already apparent in the video. I consider myself a “journalist of the future” (with moon boots and everything) because, even though I’m still a student, I focus on these principles.

First: innovation. Those who come before me were fortunate or unfortunate (depending on how you look at it) in that they were stuck with limited tools with which to be a journalist. Today, we’ve got a growing arsenal of technology to tell the important stories with, let it be livestreaming on Qik, microblogging with Twitter, or practicing link journalism with Facebook. Contrary to the popular paradigm that we’ll settle on one format, this is just the beginning of tool fragmentation. By playing and experimenting with the tools, I position myself to take advantage of what they offer.

Second: the untold stories. Using a combination of emerging tools and traditional formats, my goal is to cover the under reported, most troubling issues we face as a globally connected society. Examples include water access exploitation in India, deforestation and the climate in Haiti, and homelessness in the big cities of Latin America. Being a journalist of the future means using the tools to expand your capacity to tell the word’s most important stories.

Third: collaboration. I began this fall as the Online Editor for the Oregon Daily Emerald wanting to push the publication to innovate with technology. Given the limited resources at hand, I realised that the only way I could achieve anything significant would be to work collaboratively with my peers across the nation. From that vision, CoPress (http://www.copress.org/) was formed. Contributing to the network is an increasingly successful method of innovation.

Onward and forward. Let’s use these strategies to grow our abilities to be journalists and provide the information needed to create a better world.

Go rate Daniel’s entry and show your support. If you don’t want to enter the contest, you can be part of the future of journalism by voting.

Full disclosure: Daniel is an intern with Publish2, so he’s not qualified to win the prize of a job with Publish2. But he is qualified to get a whole lot of attention and praise for having an fantastic vision of the future of journalism. That’s purpose of this contest. You can post an entry to get attention from other companies looking for journalists who can help them evolve into the future (many of whom read this blog and use Publish2).

To all you media execs and editors reading this, we best make sure that Daniel ends up with a sweet job when he graduates. (Here’s Daniel’s blog.)

The future of journalism and news depends on the jobs that we do have being in the hands of journalists like Daniel.

So who’s next to be in the spotlight? We’ve heard from a journalism student. How about a veteran journalist?

The future of journalism is going to require that journalists know how to promote themselves and their work. This is a great way to learn. Don’t aim for high production values. Be earnest. Be creative. Be brave.

Want to promote yourself outside of the contest? Get a Publish2 profile and link to your best work. Your profile will rank high for your name in search (especially if you don’t have a blog or your own site).