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• 29 Sep 09
  

  Yule Heibel

  Great interview with Jay Rosen (conducted by Jeffey Inaba and Talene Montgomery) that delves into (and knits together) the "pro" (professional) and "am" (amateur, blogger) divide. Rosen advocates for Pro-Am journalism. And what is "the public"?
  
  "How do journalists decide how to tell stories? What are their responsibilities when reporting a story? And to what extent do they write in the public’s interest?"
  
  The questions revolve around whether journalists represent or create the public.

  jay_rosen jeffrey_inaba journalism volume_magazine citizen_journalism politics talene_montgomery

  • people involved in arts, culture, education and politics, have to figure out continually how to bring the public alive.’ It’s not just a question of information either, its also one of art. Because engaging people successfully is a social problem we have to figure out. So to me, yes, the public is there to be informed and it is something we have to bring to life. There’s no objective way of doing it; it’s an art and a commitment. I think really good journalists who care about telling the truth, who care about their stories and about having an effect are really saying, ‘I’m going to awaken the public’.
  • JR: Journalists have a responsibility to tell us what’s going on and tell us the truth and that does require impartiality. We know this from our normal lives. It doesn’t require you to be a journalist. If you went to a contentious meeting – and other people who also have a stake in what you have witnessed couldn’t go and they ask you what went on – you have a responsibility to report to the other people accurately and impartially. Yet you have other responsibilities too. People want to know not just what occurred, but also how they can affect things. Their participation and their power to affect the situation has something to do with their interest in information and there’s a vital connection between those two things.
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • JR: The great press critic AJ Liebling once famously said about freedom of the press, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one’. And blogging means anyone can own one. That is a switch and 'citizen journalism' is simply a name for this fact. People have the tools and therefore they also have the powers of the press. Citizen journalism is when ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’ pick up these tools and use them to inform one another.
    • First: we need verified information. The most important reason for having professional journalism is it represents a verification system we otherwise would not have. The essence of what they do is not just that they report stuff, but that they report stuff that's verifiable.
    • Second: there are some kinds of stories – investigative journalism, for example – that you can only get if somebody is working on them full-time. Finding out facts requires somebody working on it. That argues for professional journalism. There's a whole class of things for which that is true.
      
    • Third: we need people with power, including and especially people in government, to provide access to the public itself. But it's not practical for them to provide access to the public at large, so we need representative figures to pose questions. And obviously that, in a practical way, argues for people who have that access, because certain stories can only be gotten that way!
    • So what is citizen journalism good at? We don't necessarily know entirely yet, because we haven't built good structures for it. But one of the things that it's good at – which really comes from blogging – is that having people who really care about issues guide you to news about those issues is actually a better way of learning about them than depending on, say, the LA Times. What's great about citizen journalism is that it is born from participation and it is created for your participation. The bloggers have been the ones – like amateurs in other new arts – who have actually pushed the craft forward. They’re the ones who learned to write with links; they’re the ones who learned to take the freedoms of the web – which are vast – and bring enough discipline to them through forms that make blogging intelligible.
    • JR: I'm interested in this thing people are calling Pro-Am journalism. [1] Ultimately the strongest forms and the best discoveries will be made with ‘pro’ journalists working with networks of amateurs, connected through smart web tools and applications and motivated to produce new information.

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