Newdef
"Finding a New Definition of Journalism"
9:15 a.m.-10:45 a.m., Thurs., June 29, 2006 University of Massachusetts -- Amherst
Summit participants and panel members convene to discuss the growing and changing definition of journalism and journalists.
Participants: Tom Rosenstiel, Project for Excellence in Journalism (moderator); Jeff Jarvis, City University of New York and PressThink.org; Helen Thomas, Hearst newspapers columnist; Josh Wilson, editor, NewsDesk.org; Chris Peck, editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal; John Donley, editor NOLA.com; Chris Daley, professor, Boston University; Amy Eiseman, professor, American University.
ALL QUOTATIONS ARE PARAPHRASED UNLESS IN DIRECT QUOTES. FOR PRECISE QUOTATION AND FULL CONTEXT, REFER TO THE QUICKTIME VIDEO.
Introduction by Bill Densmore, director/editor The Media Giraffe Project.
Tom Rosenstiel: Journalism is really a conversation among citizens. Jim Cary talked about how in public houses, the publican was the bar owner. The idea of truthfulness.
(4:23) Tom Rosenstiel -- The idea is that journalism should be truthful – that didn’t come down from Mount Journalism or the planet news. It came out of a gradual evolution, and actually that one was pretty quick, of people who wanted to provide news and do it quick, realizing that the audience wanted it to be truthful. As journalists began to decide that they could aggregate a bigger audience and be independent of factions they started to realize that if they told colorful stories and sensationalized and had comic strips then a lot of other things that we think of as journalism – all of these were essentially techniques, professionalized routes that the audience responded to. They didn’t come out of nowhere. And they were really tools that served the purpose. They really didn’t change the conversation among citizens. ( ends about 5:28)
Now there is disruptive technology over the last 20 years. It is exposing the disgruntlements we have as consumers about MSM, corporate journalism, the liberal press.
What’s the new role for the journalist?
(6:40) The issue really isn’t who is a journalist and who isn’t . . . I think that the question we are asking is what constitutes news and information that citizens need that journalistic. (6:55) Put another way the issue is not who is a journalist but what is journalism. (7:12)
A few ideas to address that:
(7:28) The definition of news is simple and unified. That’s exploded. There are many definitions of news, many kinds of news. Breaking news is news that sort of presents new facts to us has become a commodity that is in oversupply, that is easy to acquire (7:55) and you may not even have to pay for it, you probably don’t have to pay for it and if you are a provider you don’t have to pay very much to include. (8:07) In some cases no cost. (8:14)
So there is all this information in the Cary sense under the tent. What is the role for professional news organizations? Do they have a role, are they obsolete?
It is about journalism not journalists
.(8:41) It is not a matter of letting them be the journalist because that is over now. Lots of people are journalists now. But is there anything that the traditional professional journalist has to offer in this new landscape? (8:58) That enables and complements what these other new players are offering? (9:12) Well the first thing is that the professional journalist is no longer a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper as you know, that metaphor evolved in the early 20th century. There is an old quote from Walter Lippman that defines the gatekeeper perfectly. He said in “Liberty and the News” that the journalist’s role in society … the journalist sifts through the gossip and the rumor and the innuendo as it flows through the newsroom and the facts and he calls it one of the sacred and priestly acts in a democratic society. (9:41) And we let the facts go by and keep all the other juicy stuff in the newsroom to giggle about. And that gatekeeper role over truthfulness is what journalists do.
The gatekeeper role goes away
(9:57) Well no longer. People can get all kinds of information without us. We’re standing by this gate and there is no fence on either side and the rumor cows and the gossip cows (10:07) are roaming the range. They’re on talk radio, they’re on blogs, they’re everywhere. And so we’re not playing that role anymore. (10:14) If that metaphor is no longer operative, what is the metaphor that works? What’s the new role?
Journalist as authenticator
(10:45) Well I would offer a few ideas, or roles. One thing a journalist can do (10:28) because of the time and the skills they supposedly have – not Gannett, who cares about Gannett, we’re talking about the people who work in the newsroom, the journalists the people that actually develop the news. One role that I think they can play (10:43) can naturally aspire to is be an authenticator . . . what can I believe what’s true, what’s not? (11:05) Another that the aspire to is to be a sensemaker, to help people assimilate information. Authenticating is part of that. But that is also what Rush Limbaugh does, and Bill O’Reilly. They help people make sense of news. So does Al Frankin. They help people decided what to think about it, how to feel about it. They may do it differently than journalists and there is an opportunity too for where traditional journalism goes. (12:04)
Journalist as monitor of debate
(12:05) Another tradition of the industry I think is to uncover things that would not otherwise be known that take a lot of time and resources and watchdoggery skill. This is not going to come from other sources but this is something that traditional news sources with their resources and training are in a position to provide and also authenticate it when it comes from other places. Another I would say is to be I would say a monitor of the whole debate because one of the things that we know that is occurring in the other media landscape, the new non-professional or non-traditional is people are segmenting and going to the place where they can get affirmation journalism experience. They go to places where they already agree with the person, that person’s helping to make sense of things, but they are not hearing a lot of contrary or dissonance. We don’t like cognitive dissonance. So actually traditional journalism is a place that can convene contrary views, you’re exposed to them and you hear people that you don’t like like and that you don’t agree with and you think they are full of . . . what they also have to say which frankly is a useful thing in a civil society. And in so doing, convene. (13:30)
Journalist as enabler of citizen conversations
Traditional journalism is also, for better or for worse, where a lot of people congregate. As the previous slide showed, less than half the market, but that is more than any other single institution in most communities. (13:46) Another thing that I think journalists can do is they can enable, complement, train, work with, embrace the citizens who want to communicate with each other, who want to be sentinels for one another, who want debate, who want engagement. They can convene that, they can become part of that, and frankly if they align with that rather than become threatened by it they can help ameliorate the problem that I hear everywhere I go which is that the MSM are the bad guys are the people who screwed up the news, who are to blame for most of what is wrong with society, including the decline of the San Francisco Giants, my beloved Giants. (14:42) And that may be exaggerated but one way to ameliorate that is to embrace these things, but to identify, where we complement and raise up these other things. We are no longer the gatekeepers, and that’s a good thing. This is an opportunity. If you think of this in journalistic terms and not financial terms, this is a fanastic moment, a wonderful, empowering moment for those in the newsroom who want to produce journalism. (15:20)
(15:56) What is the essential role that news plays in peoples lives? How do we further that role? Don’t confuse routine – the things we’ve done or the professional norms that we’ve developed. Don’t confuse those professional routes with our larger goals and purpose. (16:17) Which aren’t going to change, actually. We have a new edition of “The Elements of Journalism,” that is going to come out in a few months and one of the things that we say is six years after we wrote the first edition of this book, with blogging and all those things, we feel that the principles are actually more relevant and stronger, frankly, than every, because the citizen journalists who are merging aspire to these things almost instinctively.” (16:51) Jeff?
Jarvis: moderate, enable, educate
JEFF JARVIS: Tom, that was wonderful. That was spectacular. And I think that list of what we become is exactly right. I am really glad we are asking this question because it is the right questions to ask. As you say no longer who is the journalist, but what is journalism and how do we expand that role and how we explode that role. And that is what we celebrate then, that it moves everywhere. (17:19) Anyone can perform and is performing an act of journalism and what is our role in that and I’ll put down three things. (17:32) One is to moderate, the stuff is going on all around us. We help in new ways to gather and share news. Our role may be due to a lot of the things you say, authenticate, bringing things together , to become a moderator, Bear Kundred the head of Gruner and Yahr said that recently and I think that he is right.(17:43) Second we become an enabler as you say and that involves tools like promotion, ad revenue with ad networks for blogs, we’ve got to enable. The third thing I want to mention and I want to uncharacteristically brief, is we also want to educate. (18:00) If we see this new world out there where journalism can happen anywhere, where that is good for the world, we must believe that is good if we are truly journalists. Perhaps our role, I said once on a show we have to train the bloggers and the bloggers yelled at me and they were quite rightly yelled at me and said we don’t need your shakin’ training. But then I turned around to bloggers and said do you want to know about freedom of information, do you want to know how to avoid libel, yea, do you want to know this do you want to know that they said yea. (18:32) So I think we think of the newsroom is a classroom, the first step is to bring people in teach us things and to have that new relationship right there and realize that the people out there know more than we do – bring them in. The second thing maybe we get people to teach each other as part of the moderation. But third is maybe we do have some things to teach and it’s a real hard role model for us to view because we were lecturers before but a true teacher recognizes that it is a conversation and I think can bring real benefit to this new community of journalists out there, amateurs and professionals. (19:04) So I think we think of ourselves in an entirely new way that is really two way, which feels like we’re in a classroom. Back to you. (19:14)
Bloggers: Journalism’s best customers
(19:25) TOM ROSENSTIEL: A lot of peole in this room have been to conferences like this before and seen this divide. And I don’t see the divide. Bloggers are traditional journalism’s best customers and traditional journalists are often the heaviest readers of blogs. But there bridge bridge between them, and I use bloggers here as a proxy for many constituencies there. But the bridge between them is they are all civically engaged, and they want to talk about stuff. God bless ‘em. There aren’t enough. Because some of those 700,000 people in Richmond are not.
(20:10) Jeff Jarvis asks Jon Donley of Nola to say what he saw in New Orleans that changed his view of things.
JON DONLEY -- Donley says that as opinion editor in San Antonio, it was easy to see that people had a clearer view and wisdom that matched the opinions of the people he saw as the elite opinion readers. He was frustrated that they were throwing out 95% of those letters to the editor every week because they had no room. The most vibrant part, the part that attracted me the most was the ability to interact and get information from famous authors and just talk to people who were my peers – other people who were online. The Internet developed no-space-limited opinion areas, you could see people just light up and that thing we call democracy the people it gave them a new voice. That’s my background. As Katrina showed, there was a deep divide before Katrina between our website and our newspaper and the newspaper stands on the professional side of the line and the website, you can’t really trust it. On the other hand we had thousands and thousands of people writing in with these heart wrenching stories that you just knew were true. Well could we authenticate them? Not really. But the most egregious errors that occurred during Katrina went through our professional hands. (24:06) We had tens of thousand s of people killed and babies being raped and alligators swimming up canal street. Meanwhile, down in Shel Med I’ve got 20 people who are climbing their way up into their attics and chopping their way through and trying to survive but these guys are not just saving their lives, they’ve got their digital cameras with them and they are feeling a need to record that for history and they are snapping pictures of the water rising and …. Room window and following them u p to the attic and then sitting up in 150 mile an hour winds with the neighbor’s houses floating by. You don’t get a much more of journalism than that. No reporter in the world can go and get that story. He will not ever experience having the water come up, having to chop through his roof and then sit up there watching his town … ending them to me. I’ve got 82 pictures from one guy sitting on a roof in a hurricane and you don’t get any better than that. And meanwhile we’re all huddled down in the hurricane bunker doing the best we can and we’re getting dribs and drab sand who do you think we’re getting’ the information from you know who. … information from emergency officials sitting in hurricane bunkers with no way, but wait John didn’t you hear from a reader out there that this happened. OK let me call then, type up a little story from Shel Med. To a certain extent being a reporter is going and getting those people that we look down on … and then we write up their stories and somehow that adds value to it and I just question in these days, the big story of Katrina is really something to a great extent told by the people because all of the normal authority figures tat we have were out of communication and our professional journalists were up to their …. Sorry, went on a rant. (26:36)
Thomas: How do you verify truth of blog reports?
(26:36) HELEN THOMAS: First I’d like to say I certainly agree with you. The thesis of journalism is nothing can replace being there to see with your own eyes. That makes the best journalist. But with all due respect, don’t you hate people who start like that. Tom I think you’ve only given new names to what we really do. Not to the broad extent that you would like to see it. But I think the whole question of …. Truth, that is supposed to be our holy grail, and everything else that follows is being done but not on the wide scale. .. The tragedy to one-newspaper towns and everyone else wants to get into the act because of the whole new technology. But it’s still not real journalism in my opinion, you can have people like the Swift Boaters, you can demonize liberals … by the right-wing talk sows. People have opinions, they are calling in and so forth, but there is no way to counteract that with …. Commentary have been wiped out of the airwaves. I think everything you said is true, more so and you have good names for it. But that is what we really, really do and I think that really authenticates journalism and I don’t think we’ll ever change our … what we really are is the seekers of truth. I don’t think you can have a democracy without some truth. And what appalls me though is the passivity of the American people. Even when they have the truth thrown at them, …. They are walking around like zombies when they should be acting. (28:25)
Key point: Corporations and faux-citizen groups can blog, too
ROSENSTIEL: (28:30) I think Helen raises a really important point which I’ll raise now and maybe Chris wants to react to that … or may be anticipating this. I think we need to mindful of the fact that political institutions, political activists and players, …. Use the new technology. The same thing that allows your guy on the rooftop in Katrina to take a picture also allows Sony Corp. or General Electric to set up faux citizen groups or movie studios to create phony movie-review sites . . . the technology works for everybody and it also means some of the citizen communication is also political propaganda and (29:24) some of it … all of that is part of, makes the job of authenticating the truth … more difficult.” (29:34)
Peck: The very relationship between journalists and public is changing
(29:36)CHRIS PECK: To pick up … seemed to me you’re both focusing on there, is there was relationship that journalists had to the world that those of us sitting at this table who grew up …. 20th century, they kind of understood what it was. It was a house we lived in, we understood who the priests were, we understood how it all …. Very relationship is very much changing under our feet right now and it is hard to get your hands around it because on the one hand you do see the incredible power of the people who can help with telling the story …. Also see the need for real journalism to sort the wheat from the chaf and so forth. (30:35) But what concerns me a little bit about what Jeff is saying is this idea that all … potentially good, that somehow this idea of all the people coming into the house and making a lot of noise about journalism, that this is a good thing … different aspects to it, but there are some very difficult aspects to what is going on now. . I’ll give you some examples here. … it is true that journalism is much more of a conversation now. That’s true. If you’re writing, you are going to feed back, and there are other people in your community who want to play journalist. And there are some very positive aspects about that. But there is something about that two-way conversation that you also have to recognize. (31:20) One of the things that that does is … want to talk to people just like you in a two-way conversation – that is very easy to do. It doesn’t mean that you don’t …. People, but it is diminished in some ways, I think, or made it more difficult to sort out truth from fiction. It’s made it somewhat more easy to hang around more with people to reinforce your idea, not that you won’t get other points of view but if you really want to you can . .. significant degree. I was thinking here. I live in Memphis now. I was thinking about the Baptist church, which is very big in Mempis. And they have a gigantic website … public way to keep their congregation intact. And one of the things I’ve noticed is I get less and less fewer letters to the editor who might disagree with the politics of the newspaper an d the reason is that … they have tended to say that is just what they do, we will go hanging out and do the things that we do. And that worries me a little bit because we need to have that back and forth. (32:30) And the other thing … cause really difficult, yea there is a lot of communication in the world right now, a lot of back and forth, but one of the things you learn as a student is the more you communicate actually, … easier to understand what’s going on in the world. In some ways there is a whole lot of communication the more you go online and look about what’s going on in the world. … sources. We can go read Al Jezzira, and Al Arabi to learn about the Middle East, but at some point it only add is to the ability, it makes some people say, well gee, I’m not … going on. And the old days you sort of relied upon the temple of this is what’s going on. And the fact that you have more information doesn’t exactly make you more … know, have a better understanding of the world. It can be more confusing. And maybe the last thing that I think is really a challenge right now is news (33:30) … is really getting squeezed. If you think about all that is out there that is online, the news aspect of that is very, very small, if you think of bandwidth. And if you think of your kids or how much time you spend on the Internet, and what you see is the amount of time they spend on news as compared to all that other stuff is not that much …. News is kind of boring in many ways. It has to do with reports. There is an aspect of it that is … thing is kind of not as sexy, is not as creative. And Jon Stewart is a great example and Rush Limbaugh. What are they first? They’re very entertaining. They’re fun. They are fun to watch. Now with this whole business of news you have to incorporate, honestly, some degree of entertainment value or you’re not going to have an audience. (34:25) So I guess the reason I’m pointing this out is there are some … upside of what we’ve talked about opening up the pipeline of having all this communication …. It has created this environment where really … for news and journalism to swim in that environment. Because some of the challenges that the new media create and … kind of makes news a tough go.
JARVIS: That’s just the opportunity. (34:53)
HELEN THOMAS: (34:58) I’d like to say that in the first place … I do think that we’re missing the whole business of government domination and government control of … passivity and the going along stenographer type of reporters in the White House in the runup to the war. But after Katrina, apparently they were unleashed. Apparently Anderson Cooper was told, ‘You can show your emotion now,’ …. You can really delve into the question. And this is unconscionable to me that the very fact you are being almost told by New York corporate heads of how you react to story and whether you have any nerve. And maybe this is apropos of nothing but in the old days when I thought I used to be a tough questioner, Johnson, Ford, Carter and so forth I got these phone calls from people who said who in the hell elected you? What right do you have to ask those questions? … war started they said, ‘Where are you, where’s the press, why are you letting all this stuff?’ Because each viewer was really a journalist and they said these are the questions I would have asked. I’m sorry, Jeff, I don’t mean to be ….
ROSENSTEIL (36:22) I want to go to Amy and …. But let’s go to Amy [Eiseman] now. You’re in touch with younger people. Fifteen years ago there was a big study that came out from Andy Kohut called “The Age of Indifference,” which suggested … kids weren’t interested in the outside world, didn’t read didn’t do a lot of things. It seems to me now 15 years later we know they are interested, they do go online. … in the world around them. But is it different than our generation.
AMY EISEMAN: Teaches online journalism and a convergence course at American University. She talks about how she is teaching citizens to become journalists.
Eiseman: College students reads brands
(37:20) EISEMAN: They are very engaged. I ask each class what they they are reading and it is BCC.Com, actually. They find it to be incredibly … and not one sided. And then they read the brands, which is nice to know. They’ll go to NYTimes. Com. A lot of things come over their alerts, on their PDAs. And they’re …. Social networking sites and they always say to me I saw it on Yahoo News and I have to explain to them where it might really be coming from. One of the challenges … teaching journalism is a little bit toward what Chris was talking about in terms of citizens. (37:58) We have to teach them media literacy and teach them how to find credibility. And this is not their fault. They’ve grown up … where information is coming to them, they haven’t had to go get it and they haven’t really had to ask where did that come from, because it’s flat. … to Crdaig’s List, I went here, here’s information, I’m buying it. (38:24) The second thing that we have to teach them, and this is a challenge, …. Again then you have had information coming to them. And we have to teach them, ‘Yes, it is OK to walk up to someone and ask them a question.’ Well how do I do that, they ask. … night I saw it online and I went there and it wasn’t. Well did you call ahead of time and make sure the meeting was still … call and find out what the agenda was about … I guess the educators’ heads are going up and down about this. I guess where I’m coming from is they are wonderfully involved, they are wonderfully hungry about information. The need help navigating it. And we need to tell them how to navigate it. (39:10)
(39:12) JOSH WILSON -- The whole idea of the Internet as scary and disruptive, … is a bit of a snipe hunt a bit of a red herring. Maybe it’s just because I’m a member of the post-McLuhan generation, I mean I’m off that first generational cohort that grew up with Star Wars so until you can show me floating … robots that can pass the xxx test I’m not impressed. But I’m inspired .. by the medium as a media tool and I want to use it as a practicing journalist, I want to make use of it. … conversation of democracy. And the reason I started NewDesk.org is after working at SFGate.org … Chronicle Publishing and Hearst Corp., I couldn’t get the fourth-largest newspaper web site in the country to start …. An environment and science web page. They weren’t interested, it was not financially practice. So for me the real issue comes back to a real bottom-line … finance. How do you pay for it? How do you get the money people out of the way so you can do your journalism (40:24) … work in a newsroom and have been told by a news director who thought that the story would not sell newspapers, even though it is an important story. … common problem. So it comes back to that basic issue of making use of the tools at hand for the the public benefit. And when you’re dealing with a Wall Street economy where 12% of 18% ain’t good enough … Jack Shafer can write in Slate last week that newspapers are dying, but dying profitably. Then the issue is …oh the Internet is scary. It’s somebody is in the way of you doing your job how do you solve that problem. … And that’s where the Internet is disrupting things and that’s where the room for the innovation is. (41:10) The practice … field go get it. And if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. And I can’t wait to get it. And if anyone wants to talk about funding ideas come talk to me, I have pledge forms right up here.” (41:23) I’m doing corporate web writing and branding and positioning and boy it pays a lot better than ….
Chris Daly: Lessons from history
CHRIS DALY: (41:38) Teaches at Boston University. He teaches the history of journalism. I think it is worth pointing out here that yes we are in a period of transition, but it’s not the first one. … in this garden of Eden where nothing ever changed and now we’re being kicked out and will have to live in some new fashion. In fact there have been many trends … and transitions over the last 300 years or so. In America would could start the clock ticking in 1704 with the first newspaper. … for those very first newspapers was to publish a lot of things that were not terribly controversial and were not terribly factual either. And it did not work out. Newspapers were forced to change. They changed a lot in the 19th century. They got a lot bigger and more … and then when radio came along, my God people were saying they sky is falling, it’s the end of civilization, it’s the end of standards … as we have known it. And of course then television was even more again, the new threat and sure enough each time there’s been an accommodation between the business model and the guiding philosophy or idea of what journalism should be about. (43:14) So I think it is very helpful to have a perspective in mind for a lot of these conversations.
William Lloyd Garrison
I would throw out one example that is I think a very interesting one and that is the case of William Lloyd Garrison who was first a printer … time in the early part of the 1800s and then as a young man decided to start a newspaper to support the cause of immediate abolition of slavery. Well, he put out that paper on a weekly basis every …. 35 years. now that is in itself was a tremendous accomplishment. (44:00) But I think you could see in Garrison a person who was …. An independent spirit, someone very highly motivated. One of the keys to his success was that he used his newspaper, The Liberator, … that didn’t even know it existed, in 18….. it, there were very few white people in America who thought abolition was a good idea and most of them were not in touch with each other. But once the liberator came on the scene and made it through the first few months, thanks to subscriptions from Black readers, …. Community began to find itself. Individuals all around the country were able to hook up. (44:49) Another thing Garrison did was almost the equivalent of linking to other people. He published a lot of things in The Liberator written by other people, including, at times, his enemies. … in fact he was saying to his own audience, ‘Isn’t this interesting, look what they are saying about us?’. … much more complex and interesting newspaper than anyone else was publishing at the time. (45:18)
Garrison hosted a movement
Finally let me throw out another idea about Garrison. One of the things he did was to host … and that’s one of the keys to the success of his newspaper is that he literally pulled people together and kept a movement going. And it was really the movement that sustained the paper. As a business … it never amounted to much. Circulation never got over about 3,000. But it was very successful on its own terms. So I throw that out as an example of something from the past that may have some relevance …. (45:57)
Rosenstiel: Recap – authenticators, convenors, sensemakers
ROSENSTIEL: Reacting to a couple of points form the panel. There are lessons from the history of journalism to react to this moment. Can look at Hearst, and Pulitzer and Garrison when we were closer to citizens. “When information is in greater supply, knowledge is in shorter supply.” One of the things driving people to Rush Limbaugh or Al Frankin is that’s a shortcut. That’s a challenge if traditional news organizations think of themselves as authenticators, convenors and sensemakers. We are proposing to do it the hard way. …. The third thing is that the role of the technology changes with the event. When the tsunami it’s in Indonesia, citizen sentinels with cameras are the journalist we want t hear from. Six months later when the story is are the donations, acquiring goods and services, that is a more intern story, involving bureaucracy and government and simply having citizens taking pictures is part of the story of goods and services being delivered (48:27) but why they are not and why they are not hear and not there, other skills are required and it maybe that a greater network of citizens and journalists working in tandem is necessary … that’s something that we need to be aware of as we move as professionals in this new world and it is that our role shifts with the kind of the story. In the same way as we are not gate keepers we have to ask, what does the citizen need from this story now? Because that’s a different think from when we were the only information that they had about anything.” (49:03)
DONLEY: (49:05) There was a surge of citizen journalism up front. But the people wo were empowered then are still empowered now. Normally the second highest traffic on our website involves user submitted photos. And I’m not talking about Johnny on the hotdog stand. As a matter of fact this week in Kenner a citizen with a digital camera was jogging and discovered a 250 foot long and 20-foot deep crack in the Lake Ponchartrain levy that was missed by ever professional journalist who’s congregated, missed by the Army Corps of Engineers and now is a major source of concern. … I say that we’ve got people who are now empowered and they get it, they do understand truth just as well as any of us do. The idea that they are somehow less cognizant of what truth is, they may well move toward their peers but that is exactly the same as democracy has always been. … .big level playing ground where there’s group of most citizens who say OK our mind is completely open until we get all the facts. (50:47) that’s not the way it was, that’s not the way our revolution happened, it was people of like-minded nature working together and still when we think about the professional press as Helen has brought up several times since I’ve been here, she is pointing out their gross failures in covering the Bush administration. Well, doesn’t that make them part of the problem? (51:17) Because I see … and Latin America puttin’ their lives on the line and getting shot for printing stuff and evidently here we’re scared because we just don’t want people thinking badly about us.
JARVIS: Chris [Peck], you are sandwiched by the solution to your problem. You see all this talk going around and its really not … people just tlaing. Why wouldn’t we listen, why wouldn’t anybody listen? And on your left you have John Donley, who played that role … he’s finding all the good stuff, incredible good stuff. He’s moderating. And on on you’re right you have someone [in Josh Wilson] who cares so much about journalism he is going to do it wherever he can and there’s … a path that will enable him. And in the end our job is not to tell the truth, our job is to help the …[public or] -- whatever we want to call them today -- decided the truth and they do that among themselves. And the conversation works around. (52:15)
Kebbel going to where the letters are
GARY KEBBEL (52:25) Talking about the idea of changing roles, I just wanted to use Chris’ idea of letters to the editor. … an anecdote perhaps of a way to do this. You talked about the fact that you see fewer letters to the editor coming in and perhaps because they are going to more … people feel a greater affinity to. I would just suggest that the fact you have recognized that means you have taken step one and step two is the journalist’s role now is to … go places and seek those letters and actively go and get the letters from those other places. So no longer can we be the passive recipient of letters …. I think it is … we can’t be the passive recipient of news or letters to the editor or anything, we have to be much more active in how we perceive our role. … (53:18)
CHRIS PECK: (53:20) I think that’s a really important point. I thnk the passive role of the journalist in the ivory tower … and its really important that the journalist, and this is what you learn from I think what’s going on with the technology. You have to go out and engage. You have to …. Go out and look. I jut want to say one thing about your argument that the solution to my problem is on my left and my right. I’ve got some other problems I need solved too, so if you don’t mind we’ll get to those later. (53:57) But I’m also the solution to their problem. Because I’m talking to Josh here and Josh is a wonderful example of someone who is inspired, who wants to do sober, serious journalism, …. He doesn’t have an advertiser to support it. His problem is there is no economic model to support what he does. And on my left here, NOLA.Com is wonderful. But what really made NOLA.Com was … were used to going to the Times Picayune for information about what goes on in New Orleans. They had to have an institution … was a very great transition off to their website. So you put these two things together, and this is the problem that I don’t think the other … you have to have an economic model to support journalism, which we do not have online yet . .. and you have to have someone … an institution that is large enough that can stand up to the forces of government. (55:05)
JARVIS: So let’s put it together. Let’s do it.
FRANCESCA RHEANNON: I’m glad to hear the word truth here because it is not one that I always hear in journalism. … although you’d think it would be and I think the issues that have just been raised are really key to that problem and that is the dead weight of the corporate control of media on the issue of truth and I just wanted to address what you said what are the three functions of journalism and how that’ s impacted … how do you deal with it witin the current structure. I don’t think it is an accident that people go to BBC.com. BBC.com is supported by the government (55:51) And … money in England and we don’t have that kind of support and whatever we do have, I work in public radio, is being decreased all the time. … investigation for example, how do you do investigation when news teams are being cut, we don’t have as many … much fewer, you know, by orders of magnitude, foreign correspondents on the group to actually get the news. How do you do it in terms of moderation, screening, when people are afraid they are going to be … I mean Helen Thomas was at the White House press correspondents dinner when Stephen Colbert did his excrutiatingly funny … and the next day if you hadn’t seen it all you would hear is that it wasn’t [funny because] (56:42) … [nobody] laughed. Well there was a reason was nobody laughed, as Helen told me last week, and that is that people were afraid to laugh. … not because it wasn’t funny.
(56:55) And finally a place for contrary views, well … .by FAIR, the media watchdog organization, which shows that even on NPR the views tend to be overwhelmingly conservative, …. Are on the rightward … end of the spectrum of liberals. So I think even from the traditional media we’re getting that range of views. I mean I get more of a range of views from Amy Goodman. … when she has the real extreme right on debates with the left, so I’d just like to ask people to address that. (57;30)
JEFF DAVIDIAN (57:50) I was a philosophy major in college and I have a view of how the world should be. It should be just, fair … I think journalism is a practice, it is not the employee of a media organization. Journalism is a practice, it is something that we do. The best journalism tells people things whether they want to hear it or not. … user driven. It is what you need to tell them. That is responsibility of journalism whether you work for the … blog if you’re doing what democracy needs to have happen you are doing journalism. I don’t know that fashion writing is journalism. (58:39) …. Sports columns are journalism. I think journalism is about … a business model. Maybe we can’t have professional journalists if the business doesn’t support it. Maybe doctor’s wives, who don’t have to work, … journalists but a journalist does a certain thing and it is not going to be changed by a business model. (59:07)
JOSH WILSON: I can just respond really quickly. … Desk.org is concerned … we have a non-profit model and anybody with money, I’d be glad to talk to you about it. … we can make it work. The flip side of that is if you’re a blogger, go open source and be afraid of monopolization and commercialism. Rupert Murdoch bought …. Bertelsman, Disney, Time-Warner, they will follow in his footsteps. They will buy Blogger.com, they … and what you’re going to wind up in five years is the commodificiation of the blogosphere similar to what you have seen in the news media cross the board, incentives for … to produce coverage, say a band comes out …. (59:55), have a concert tour. Teen-aged bloggers are going to get credits toward concert tickets if they produce positive coverage of the band which gets a lot of traffic. And that’s . .. plugoller as yet unexplored. (1:00:15).
Peck: Going to where the audience is: Sports, fashion
CHRIS PECK: (1:00:15) You put your finger on what it ought to be. I mean the way it ought to be from what you are describing is people ought to care about democracy and ought to care about tracking down the facts. … but the point I was going to there, is you mention fashion and sport, that may not be journalism. But you think about a lot of young people … are expressed by their fashion and the music they listen to. That is where their politics and world view comes from. Many people’s sense of who’s heroic and …. is defined by sport. So the thing that you really see when you are in a commercial enterprise of journalism is you have to go to people and … kind of where they are and that’s really the challenge now, how do you make someone who really cares about fashion and sport, make … care about politics and the war in Iraq? (1:01:25)
Rosenstiel: Community as gathering place: The intellectual common
ROSENSTIEL: Let me just … another thing that James Carey wrote is journalism is about creating community. And one way you create community is you create a space where people gather intellectually. … a common …. A place where they might then accidentally run into things that they didn’t know …. If that was all journalism was then you wouldn’t be creating a community. (1:01:55)
NEWSDESK: You can break through partisan divides by doing quality reporting. The whole Red State/Blue State divide … as you said it’s getting news to people when they want to hear it or not. If you tell the story well and don’t let your opinion or th shortcomings of the commerce medium get in the way, you’ll ….
Brandt: Focus on what’s building positive world
STEVE BRANDT: (1:02:20) Says he is blogging on the conference for the Huffington Post and got a civil-engineering degree from UMass. He has a great interest in the built world. I believe there is information people need to have to stop bad things . . .and to build good things. … I’m hoping that in reinventing journalism and what matters we will see the need to focus every day on what is going on that is helping to build a positive world.. (1:03:52) This is not about left or right, it is about forward.
TISH GRIER: (1:04:13) Thanks John for bring up that the people who are doing citizen journalism are smart people. There is the impression they are goners. In fact they are highly intelligent with master’s degrees doing it because they feel there is a need to do it. There’s too much focus on the negative blogs. The magic middle of Technorati is where it is going on. You don’t know what the poster read. “Give us time, let us evolve, let us be part of things. Don’t coopt us. Let us do it.”
ROSENSTIEL: I have not heard that here, that denigation.
TISH GRIER: I have been to about nine different conferences this year.
STEVE FOX: Appreciates how Tom managed the sessions. This notion of contrary views is a very interesting point. I would just urge all the educators to take Amy’s advice on this notion of media literacy. … looking for contrary viewpoints. And I think we have to find a way to get the older demographic to search for media literacy and get contrary viewpoints. … We are at a point right now where a lot of people are going out and searching for information based on prefabricated assumptions. (1:06:21)
Washburn: Teaching e-journalism from Bellview, Ontario
ROBERT WASHBURN: From Canada, Bellview, Ontario. He is thrilled to be hearing this. He has been teaching e-journalism since 1999. “I wanted to talk just for a moment about the three principles that we teach: To educate, engage and empower. Our students were T-shirts that they are part of the E3 team and that’s how we build team spirit. But one of the things … panel about this is how we outreach to people who are not writers, who are not natural storytellers?” They had a federal election in Canada in the winter and a debate was streamed. They gave reporters Blackberry units. They go out and blog things and email right online. He told them to go to places where people aren’t participating. They went into a hockey arena. They had a transistor radio and the students asked for questions and the sent them in on the Blackberry and soon they heard then on the radio. And within no time we had 30 … young journalists clamoring to ask a question and to hear the answer. And we went to the local doughnut show, and we went to the bus station and the train depot and we had this little army going … to hear what the panelists has to say about reaching out. We all know that people have stories to tell. What are we doing about the people that don’t have the skills? (1:08:55)
JOSH WILSON: Be open to it. And scale down the arrogance. Folks are intimidated by the camera. Give them a chance and they’ll take it as you noticed in the hockey arena.
(1:09:15) AMY: Jut wanted to share an experience. We gave camera-photos to our students to mobblog the 2004 elections. … fascinated. Two things that came back. The younger students came back with pictures of their dorm rooms, or … and the older students – the graduates students – had gone around town and they came back and said, ‘Wow, I feel so empowered, I feel I have news with me all the time.’ And I think that’s the message we need to give people – that you have news with you all the time, you just need to distribution mechanism to get it out there. (1:09:54)
Hume: Battle between White House and New York Times
ELLEN HUME: I just want to thank Bill Densmore for bringing us all together before I make my comment. Because I think … very mportant conversation that is teaching me stuff. And I’m pretty old, I’ve heard a lot and I’m getting a lot. So thank you all for participating. … Yet’s have a (applause). (1:10:22) Secondly, I’m going to be the skunk. Because I’m really scared today. I’m scared not because … but you guys are helping me with that. I’m going to stand shoulder to shoulder with the bloggers and be really happy. But, there is a fight going on against the New York Times who by the way, we’re not alone in revealing secrets about our government. I watched the Christian Broadasting Network, and by the way I have covered them for the Wall Street Journal. I watched them … the battle between the Bush White House and the New York Times. Did anyone see that? You didn’t. Well you’re not watching this stuff. Or maybe you didn’t last night. But that’s OK … they found no reason why it would serve the public interest for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal others to reveal this Swift Program of tracing bank records to fight the war on terror. They found no … only the frame that said the NYTimes is fighting with the enemies and they are unpatriotic and perhaps even treasonous. (1:11:33). That word was not bandied about but …. You know what I’m talking about. So this conversation which is incredibly important and good and necessary, somewhere at this conference I don’t know where it is , we’ve got to talk about his really important assault, and it’s a moment … of day a legal assault on political scale that has been building for 30 years. I’m not a conspiracy person and I don’t think we should always defend the mainstream media, and the New York Times has had …. But Helen you and I are refugees from that White House press corp. There have been always been people there who have been doing really heroic work and they just get slammed at conferences like this. (1:12:16). … the mainstream media, they disappointed us, let’s not give them any credit. They are in a life and death struggle right now. and I just think somehow we have to do some good thinking about how do people rise …. To support he First Amendment and the ability to do that investigative reporting because it is going on every day, even in the depraved …. totally ridiculed White House press corp. Thank-you. (applause) (1:12:44)
ROSENSTEIN: We’ve got just a minute and we are going to go to one more person, but I don’t want to let that just sit. In the conferences that we go to … get a lot of bashing of the dread MSM and all that. And I’d like to just frame it this way: The issue isn’t … or this company or that company, but as Ellen has so rightly said, there has been a campaign that is expanded now, significantly to discredit one of the institutions in civil society and that institution is a free press. And it as been done by people in power because it is (1:13:36) … [in their] policy interests. It’s come from one side politically for a while but it’s also there on the left and it’s gaining force at conferences like this. Imaging a big gulf and hoping for an end for the revolution … frankly a utopian vision that’s naïve and a little Nietzchean even. But, you are going to regret it if it happens. So let’s …. And work on the possibilities and not dream of the destruction. (1:14:20)
Jarvis: The close – so what is journanism? Answers
JARVIS: I want to end by going back to Adrian Holovaty. And I’ll embarrass him. … I think he’s maybe the most innovative person we have inside the industry and I thought we’ come back and I think this surprises him. And we asked at the beginning, … in journalism, what is journalism. You are coming up with new definitions all the time. I read your commencement speech to your alma mater, at the University of Missouri … where I remember you said you learn all kinds of good rules and now it is time to break some rules. So just want to hear now how you … (1:14:49)
HOLVATY: Pressure’s on. Gathering information, distilling it, deciding what’s important and presenting it to people so they can join in the conversation.
ROSENSTEIN: In 15 seconds, each of you, how would you answer that question: Defining journalism?
HELEN THOMAS: Speaking the truth. Telling it. And I would like to just add something apropos of nothing is I don’t think anybody goes into journalism to be loved. I think they better find another profession. And it is to try and match ourselves with people in the community. It’s really to sock it to them as you said and let the chips fall where they may – that’s our job.
JOSH WILSON: Journalism in Merriam-Webster is defined rather broadly and you can put a whole lot under the roof. I think for purposes of this conference I think the conversation has a lot to do with quality control and standards and the way a traditional practice of the conversation of democracy can be extended through this new media technology while still hanging onto ideas about ethics, standards, quality control and somehow cracking the finance nut.
PECK: I think journalism is helping people make sense of the world around them in a way that they can understand.
DONLEY: I believe journalism is giving people the information the need to make our country work, to make democracy work. That’s what I was taught in J-school, I was not taught that it was my job to impose my world view on them but it was my job to as objectively as I could gather data and to educate the people and give them the tools they need that make democracy work. And that’ s my definition of journalism in the new era, that includes bringing them into the process. (1:17:17)
CHRIS DALY: This is an almost impossible question to answer. I think about how to separate journalism, how to distinguish it from lots of the forms of non-fiction writing and presentation through photos and lots of other ways. And to me I think the irreducible core of it, what separates it from all those other activities that look like it, is finding out stuff that people don’t want you to know. That’s the hardest part and that’s the part that we would really miss if it went extinct.
ANN: I think journalism has a responsibility to make sure that a diversity of voices are part of the conversation.
ROSENSTIEL: Seems to me that can happen on both sides of that trench.
END OF SESSION
