By Eleanor Haas
With all the sturm und drang about newspapers dying under the weight of production and distribution costs and other media also economically challenged, it’s all too easy to forget there’s a lot more to news than mere business models undergoing radical change.
The amazing societal model the Founding Fathers established for the US has since Day 1 relied on news people to keep government honest. It was the French – at the time of their and our revolutions - who called news people “the Third Estate” – with the corrupt government of elite nobles and the oppressed common people as the other two “estates.” But nowhere in the world but the U.S. has the press been truly free. Nowhere else has it held government feet to the fire. Think Pentagon Papers. Think Watergate. News people are key to our way of life both for keeping us informed and for enforcing accountability by those in power. But their effectiveness has been blunted by the erosion of public trust.
Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute, had some telling things to say on the subject at a recent Digital Breakfast event organized jointly by Gotham Media Ventures and Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz:
“To get people to recognize the real world, to recognize facts (and not just accept information that validates their point of view), we need trusted news tellers . . . To have a democracy, you have to try to engage people where they are. The availability of alternative sources of information allows us to check accuracy . . . The failure of the press to hold government accountable on the Iraq war led to serious mistrust of the media.
”When media produce the same kind of news they did when they were a monopoly, this causes mistrust; yet new tools are adding new power for journalists, and journalists can be way better.
”Participatory journalism – citizen journalism – occurs when the news audience uses press tools to inform one another – the Internet, digital cameras, blogging and videos,. Since they have the power and occasionally want to alert others to an opinion or experience, they have the ability to report. It’s all one system with lots of people collaborating on a single story.
“I hope for a powerful combination of professional journalists working with distributed networks of caring citizens in spite of all the irresponsible bloggers and elitists complaining about the open Internet.”
Mr. Rosen’s hope is clearly shared by others. We see evidence of this in the emergence of at least two organizations. In New York, ProPublica, a not-for-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest by using a pro-am model of professional journalists and a distributed network of 2,500 citizen journalists. In Vancouver, NowPublic, now part of examiner.com. Both are citizen journalist networks being used to create local news sites on a pro-am model with a positive cost model.
Is the hybrid pro-am model part of the answer to cost-effective news gathering? Might it also help restore public trust in news tellers? Only time will tell
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Posted by: tAYLOR t | February 07, 2010 at 04:30 PM