Journalisms death or rebirth?

I have become an avid Lifehacker.com reader over the past few months, and thanks to their RSS trickling into my inbox at a steady rate, I happen upon many great tools to enhance productivity (and frankly, not rarely the opposite, i.e. wiping a few hours of my Saturday by playing around with something I will probably never use).

One such find was Qik.com, which allows you to use your phone's build in camera as a webcam, streaming life (and live) from where ever you are, as long as you are online of course - Mobile phone operators are rejoicing at the promise of extended data package usage. That seems like a simple value proposition at first, but once you spend only a few minutes on the site and see what is actually available there, it begins to grow on you that there is much more behind this... It could be the next YouTube.

YouTube is great for its user participation, but even though it allows direct capture from the webcam, it still relies on content that is often edited, or at least cut and filtered before it is made available. Qik on the other hand is based on live broadcast. You can see what is happening, right now, when it is happening. YouTube was once feared as the possible death of professional journalism, and the same could be said about Qik. However, having just watched footage from the Palestinian protests in London, it dawned on me that that is not quite the case.

I belief that services like Qik emphasize the need for professional journalism more than ever. You see unedited images and footage that is up to your own interpretation. You could argue that thereby you see unedited, unbiased reality, but you would be wrong. The bias first of all lies with the person holding the camera of course, but secondly, it lies with the omission of one major benefit you get from professional journalism: Context.

For example, I see enraged people on the streets of London, I see devastated shopfronts on Kensington street, I see flags of Palestine, and I see angrily chanting individuals calling for a confrontation with Israel. If I did not know the context of this story, I would not have any sympathy with these protesters at all. I would possibly put them into the same corner that I would put radical Islamists supporting the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. But because I know that the demonstration started out peacefully with over 10,000 people protesting against the Israeli ground offensive, and I have been following the news over the last few weeks, I understand why they are angry. That may not mean that I condone the violent tendencies expressed by individuals among them, which have led to the destruction caused in the wake of the protests, but it makes me more understanding to their motivation. Context makes a huge difference and adds a significant amount of value to the product that is information.

In this light, I do not think that services like Qik make traditional journalism obsolete. On the contrary, I believe that journalism becomes more important then ever, as long as it is done professionally with a minimum of bias (for the record, I do not count FOX television as serious journalism).