When I was 20 years old I started working as a reporter on a small local newspaper in the county of Wiltshire. Three months later I covered a story that remains the most horrific of my career: the killing of 16 people by a gunman named Michael Ryan in the village of Hungerford, on 19 August 1987. But this article isn't about violence. It's about community. A lot of the people I met that day - police officers, ambulance drivers, the villagers themselves - spoke to me only because I worked at the local newspaper. They closed their doors to the TV stations and the big national tabloids. But they shared their shock and sadness with me because, as one of them told me, I was "part of the community".
Later I worked for a magazine about advertising, so once again I was part of a community. I knew many of my readers personally. For a long time, journalists on mass-circulation magazines and newspapers were out of touch with the community. They claimed to write for the public, but apart from a small letters page, they had little or no contact with readers. Digital media has changed all that. Reporters who write for the Web are obliged to seek and respond to comments. As anybody who has worked with a bunch of aloof and arrogant print journalists knows, this is a very healthy thing. Journalists no longer live apart from their readers, but among them.
