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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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