What is what

If you know what is what, you can do your job better.
In other words, fuck that hypocrisy and say what it is.

"Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other."

A job is something which is done to make a profit, so the job of a journalist is to say something people (many possibly) want to read.
Writing what happens or what we think or what must be said, that is a hobby, and hobbies do not pay your lunch.

"Newspapers gave us news that mattered to us and would be trivial to anyone else. Newspapers were small and local and served their communities — and their advertisers — better."
Small is nice, small is in a way easier, small pays a small lunch.

"This is very close to the real mission of a newspaper, a mission we have lost as they got bigger and more egotistical and more powerful, as they become one-size-fits-all monopolies."

Well, that happens when you want to make more money.
Local is good, but doesn't pay as National.
National collects more interested people and more fees.
A bigger income, more commercial (or better paid)a bigger salary.

"We need to help people do it themselves. Yes, themselves."
It's like saying you need to help Iraq people to help themselves.
Usually people who like to write, who write as a hobby do not need the help of journalists.
I try to translate it in words out of Hypocrisy.
Since people like to write and other people like to read what those people write, where can we make some money out of it, to save the job that could be lost otherwise?
If the role of a journalist is to comment the news, to report the news, where is his place once others do it as a hobby and thanks to computers and the space on the Net can do it for free?
What to do when the competition gets hard and you want to save yourself a little space in this jungle which is today's news?

"I now believe that he who figures out how to help people organize themselves — letting them connect with each other and with what they all know — will end up with news, listings, reviews, data, gossip, and more as byproducts."

I guess a journalist is the wrong person to do that.
Google and many others give space and bandwidth and software to do it.
And many people found out they like to do it, and they also found out there is a way to get money out of it.
Not a salary, but new ways to earn, just like the newspapers of the past.
Space for advertising, space for services, space for comments, your comments in exchange of your interest.
The terrible thing is that a fifty years old journalist will have to compete with a fifteen years old guy who is writing news for a teens' audience.
And the drama is that he will very likely loose...