Tran­si­tion­ing from a print to a dig­i­tal news world from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

If I were start­ing out in jour­nal­ism today, I’d prob­a­bly opt to work for a Web-based pub­li­ca­tion — or start my own — rather than learn the ropes at a news­pa­per. Because those ropes are becom­ing increas­ingly frayed.

We’ve been check­ing in peri­od­i­cally with young peo­ple in the jour­nal­ism field to get their take on how they’re deal­ing with the enor­mous changes tak­ing place in the mediasphere.

One such per­son who imme­di­ately impressed me is Sharon Vaknin, a stu­dent at San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity and a producer/gadget guru at CBS Interactive’s CNET.com. She dis­cusses her entry into jour­nal­ism, broad­cast­ing and the news busi­ness in this 6-minute video inter­view shot at a busy inter­sec­tion in San Francisco.

Sharon says she’s “not really wor­ried about” the future of the news busi­ness. “Web 2.0 has given us the oppor­tu­nity to be more col­lab­o­ra­tive,” she says. “Because online is so col­lab­o­ra­tive right now, news will never disappear.”

She points to inno­v­a­tive pro­grams like the New Media Lab and Vision­ing Sum­mit as help­ing in the tran­si­tion between tra­di­tional print jour­nal­ism and its dig­i­tal future.

Watch, down­load or embed the video on Vimeo

Sharon is one of the pro­duc­ers we hired for the project. We have our first meet­ing as a group tomor­row to help steer the project for­ward, and we’ll be brain­storm­ing over the next 9 to 12 months to see what comes out of this exper­i­ment. Sharon’s roles will include brain­storm­ing with us over the year year on how to effec­tively use social media, video and cit­i­zen media, facil­i­tat­ing con­ver­sa­tions with the com­mu­nity about the par­tic­i­pat­ing non­prof­its’ causes, and pro­duc­ing media.

All in all, I was struck by Sharon’s con­fi­dence in being able to nav­i­gate the tran­si­tion to a dig­i­tal news world and look for­ward to work­ing with her as we fig­ure this out collaboratively.

Related

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• YouTube’s role in cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism (Socialmedia.biz)

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.