Participatory Journalism: Jan Schaffer

Transcript for 2005 Batten Symposium and Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Sept. 12, 2005
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Jan Schaffer Batten Awards Advisory Board J-Lab Executive Director

I want to thank the Miami Herald and USA Today for coming. They’re notable entries in this contest, and they’re just some of the examples of the other notable entries that we show online as marvelous ideas that surface that we try to give additional legs to.

I think that in this panel, we’re going to move a little more toward citizen engagement. As we all know, journalism is no longer monolithic. No one size fits all, and I think a lot of journalists don’t like that. They like the hard and fast rules and they like the conventions of journalism, but there are a lot of new players on the scene, many of whom are not journalists at all. In fact, I think they frankly abhor the label of journalism.

Yet they see themselves very much as hunters and gatherers of news, able to define what to them should be news. To them journalism is not just a one-way pipeline, it’s not a monologue, it’s a conversation, and it’s very back and forth. I think journalists fret a lot about these interlopers. “How dare they? Who could believe them? They don’t know the rules.” And amid all this activity, we have mainstream journalists coming out who are converts to the idea that it’s not just bloggers and citizen media that can build on this two-way conversation pipeline, it’s mainstream media as well. It’s no longer “The” media, as The Media Center has been known to say, it’s “We” media.

With that, I’d like to start with John Robinson, who is here from the News & Record in Greensboro to talk about his Town Square project.

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