It is becoming increasingly clear that a riot of Internet-based venues now poses a serious long-term challenge to the great organs of traditional mainstream journalism. No, Time and The Washington Post and CNN are not going to fade away any time soon. But their appeal and credibility are waning in the face of proliferating online choices that are more useful, timely, socially authentic and free. We can now connect with a huge universe of blogs and podcasts, customized news digests like the Huffington Post and Raw Story, sector forums like Slashdot and Dailykos, free community services like Craigslist, and aggregators of collective intelligence like Wikipedia, del.icio.us and Technorati.
Throw in a few credibility-shattering scandals for traditional journalism (Judith Miller’s deceptions about WMD, Bob Woodward’s coziness with Bush officials, and so on) – mix with the propaganda and lies coming from the Bush Administration — and it is no wonder that trust in conventional journalism is declining. People have become sufficiently sophisticated that many regard the very conventions of the mainstream-news genre as laughable. John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and The Onion are so popular precisely because they so brilliantly lampoon the pretensions of an aging cultural form.
I believe the real problem – the source of journalism’s identity crisis – has deeper roots in the changing relationship between corporate news organizations and news “consumers.” “The people formally known as the audience” – a term used by Dan Gillmor, the champion of grassroots citizen-journalism – are refusing to be an “audience.” People no longer want to be treated as crude demographic categories to be showered with relentless advertising, celebrity gossip and tabloid pseudo-news (“prole-feed,” as Orwell put it). Now they can participate in creating their own socially congenial, non-commercial information sphere…and frankly, that’s darn refreshing and addictive.
Jay Rosen, the journalism professor and blogger of PressThink, offers some nice insights on this topic in a recent post:
The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.
Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak – to the world, as it were.
The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another – and who today are not in a situation like that at all.
- Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.
- Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.
- Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.
- You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.
- A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.
_You [the media] don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.
The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.
An unanswered question hovers in the air, however: How will quality journalism get produced if the news universe is dominated by amateurs? Where will the money come from to support serious journalism that necessarily costs real money?
In an attempt to answer that question, Rosen is launching an experiment in user-financed journalism called NewAssignment.net. He calls it “a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit called NewAssignment.Net.” The venture aspires to combine the talent of professional journalism with the deep, eclectic knowledge of participatory communities. Rosen:
The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.
In this sense it’s not like donating to your local NPR station, because your local NPR station says, “thank you very much, our professionals will take it from here.” And they do that very well. New Assignment says: here’s the story so far. We’ve collected a lot of good information. Add your knowledge and make it better. Add money and make it happen. Work with us if you know things we don’t.
The project is still an idea, not a real organization. But it strikes me as an imaginative, worthwhile experiment. It?s clear that some sorts of risk-taking and innovation are needed if we are going to rescue journalism and re-connect it to the people whom it is supposedly serving.