Only eleven more days and TEDxAmsterdam 2011 is here! Many great speakers are coming to Amsterdam to share their ideas. One of them is journalist Joris Luyendijk, currently working as anthropologist in the London financial district for the Guardian.
Joris Luyendijk hosting TEDxAmsterdam 2009
Luyendijk is a well-known journalist in the Netherlands and abroad. Amongst others, he authored the widely praised book People Like Us, based on his experience as a correspondent in the Middle East. He has already been the moderator of TEDxAmsterdam in 2009 and this year he will have 18 minutes to share his ideas about innovative journalism and the question whether the Long Tail can save journalism.
Internet as a nice teacher
Luyendijk kindly granted us a sneak preview on the topics he wants to discuss. “I want to go into Internet as a tool for journalists to make big issues more accessible. Unfortunately, what is in the public interest, often is not in the interest of the public. It’s important for everybody to know more about climate change, food security, sustainability, pandemics, and energy. Yet, few people understand the core of these problems. Many are potentially interested, as long as the matter is explained in an accessible way. See it as a nice teacher who manages to conquer your interest for history, geography or biology at high school. I think the Internet can play this role of a nice teacher.”
Following the same learning curve
Actually, he is following this exact approach in several projects, such as his series on electrical cars for NRC Handelsblad and his current banking blog for The Guardian (see also their video interview). In both cases, he started exploring topics with which he was not familiar. “I perform the function of a teacher who is just discovering how it works along the way. As such, readers can go through the same learning curve as I do. The advantage of the Internet it is that everything is searchable and accessible. You don’t need to buy a book and read it from beginning to end, but can easily split it in 100 small bits. You can direct new readers to the basics and returning readers to more recent articles. I think journalists have not yet sufficiently exploited these options offered by the Internet.”
Luyendijk wittily points out the advantages of being a speaker rather than a presenter at TEDxAmsterdam: “It saves me a lot of time. I only have to speak for 18 minutes. As a presenter, you are a sort of referee: when nobody talks about you, you have done it well. You can’t attract attention”. He doesn’t only come to TEDxAmsterdam to speak though, but is also keen to listen to other speakers. For instance to Barry Schwartz, whose talk on the paradox of choice – the notion that the immense freedom we have paralyses us – he highly recommends.
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