Journalists need to become news integrators

As Alan Bass reports in Findings, a recent Pew survey shows the trend in news consumption is integration — culling news from various sources and formats. The seemingly simple solution presented by CNN reporter Renay San Miguel is to give news consumers what they want. In a piece for E-Commerce News he describes how he covered the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:

For the four days I was in Las Vegas, I was a true multi-platform journalist. Not only was I providing traditional live reports for CNN, Headline News and CNN International, I was also blogging for CNN.com, uploading digital photos (with accompanying snarky captions) for the tech section of the Web site, and, thanks to a flash memory-based microphone, I was providing audio podcast interviews that ended up on Apple’s iTunes. A CNN.com camera crew following me around the Convention Center floor produced streaming video reports for the network Web site.

Yes, that’s a lot of deadlines, but I loved every digital minute of it.

I suppose it stands to reason that a reporter who loves the frantic nature of deadline journalism would love having more deadlines. But if more time is being spent reformatting any given piece of information, isn’t less time necessarily being spent on gathering that information in the first place? This doesn’t strike me as a step forward for journalism.