Criticism - always good to get

(by Turo Uskali)

It is always valuable to get feed-back, and criticism. It keeps you awake and on the move, hopefully in the right direction. Colin Brayton criticized recently the innovation journalism initiative in his blog - the “virtual assignment desk”. Brayton, a journalist from Brooklyn, argues that the PR industry loves newspeak like "InJo" - the shorthand for "Innovation Journalism". Indeed, innovation itself is a word which is pretty positive in its nature. That is maybe why it is so popular among all the PR people as well as politicians. Usually, everyone is for innovations, not against them. Therefore, it is really important that journalists, like Brayton, and other intellectual language workers continuously monitor and pinpoint all the empty buzzwords, and try to replace them with better ones. Brayton wrote that the problem for a traditional journalist like he is “how to discover the pearls of true innovation in the flooded sump of newspeak that technology public relations has become.” That is what innovation journalism also tries to do, and, indeed, the task is not the easiest one.