Extracts from a report by the National Union of Journalists’ Commission on Multi-media Working set off a round of hostile commentary among British journalists online. The report ran in the union magazine The Journalist, summarised at the UK Press Gazette.
Shane Richmond at the Telegraph called it a “blinkered approach to online”. Roy Greenslade at the Guardian argued that “the brave new world opened up by the internet makes protectionist organised labour on the lines of the NUJ outdated”. Paul Bradshaw’s objection was narrower: the report, and a companion piece published under the headline “Web 2.0 is rubbish”, showed the union did not understand the term it was dismissing. Neil McIntosh, also at the Guardian, wrote that by pitting professional journalists against citizen reporters the author was “like a soldier lost in the woods, fighting the war that was won years ago”.
Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson took the Web 2.0 article apart at more length, calling it “a one-sided polemic which not only mischaracterises Web 2.0 but also misrepresents the way that journalists and editors think about collaborating with their readers”. They fixed on a single word in it, “webfolk”: “that’s as dismissive and belittling as boffins or nerds, but at least it sets one’s expectations pretty accurately for the rest of the article.”
Jeff Jarvis was blunter still, describing the document as a “whiny, territorial, ass-covering, protecting-the-priesthood, preservation-instead-of-innovation faux report”. The complaint common to all of them was that a union facing a digital transition had spent its report defending the status quo rather than helping members adapt.