How should journalists respond to transparency?

I was very taken with journa-list.com which I came across this morning thanks to a Bobbie Johnson post on Technology Guardian. The site seeks to search across the output of all online-published journalism in the UK. You can tap in a journalist's name, and up pops their most recent articles. On the front page of the site is a tag cloud, and you can click on a subject to see which journalists have written about it. And on the journalist's page itself, there's another tag cloud showing which subjects that journalist has been covering.

Personally, I find this kind of thing amazing, but it raises an interesting question: how should a journalist respond to it? The journalists I speak to (even the ones who work exclusively online) rarely look backwards over what they have done; they don't tend to have a notional tag cloud in their heads with a list of subjects, apart from maybe a few very major ones (political journalists will tend to know how often they've written about Gordon Brown in recent weeks). They tend to be looking forward, not backwards. To paraphrase Arianna Huffington, they've got attention-deficit disorder, not obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Journalism is a trade which is, almost by definition, sniffing around for the next big thing. Journalists don't tend to hang around thinking about what they've just worked on (an exception is investigative journalism, where long-term obsessive-compulsive behaviour is part of the job). But sites like this raise the question: should journalists be more aware of the history they've created? Should they pay more attention to their vapour trail?

I would argue that, today, a really effective journalist is someone who is looking forward and backwards; who is aware of the fact that the stuff they create is no longer ephemeral, here-today-gone-tomorrow. Sites like journa-list show, for those who didn't know already, that journalism is now as much about recording as reporting. Just as a site accrues Pagerank and Technoratirank and general online reputation by simply being, so a news story (or collection of stories) is a permanent state of record for as long as it sits in a database and is available via the web. That is a profound change, and one which I find most journalists are only dimly aware of.