2008 Ruhl Lecture
Participatory Media
Challenges to the Conventions of Journalism

Speech by Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Executive Director
May 8, 2008
University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication
Eugene, Ore.

It is a great privilege to be with you today to honor the memory of Robert W. Ruhl. As the editor and publisher of the Medford Mail Tribune, Ruhl worked at the nexus of community journalism. It was a moment in time when newspapers had the opportunity to bring community together - not only to impart a sense of the news but to build a sense of place as well.

A sense of place will be an important thread in my remarks today. I want to use this occasion to talk about journalism ethics in the context of the new media ecosystem that is emerging all around us. It’s an ecosytem populated by many newcomers - news aggregators, bloggers, videographers, nonprofit reporters, and hyperlocal citizen media makers, to name just a few. It’s important to understand that these media newcomers use media not so much as an act of journalism, but as an act of political or civic participation. Yet, an increasing amount of what they produce carries a lot of journalistic DNA.

How dare they, you ask? Is that ethical? Well, they would assert that they have ethics, too.

What I offer today is a list of some new questions, questions like that one. And they are questions because we don’t have all the answers yet. But we do have a lot of clues.

Some of you will applaud these questions; some will denounce them. But I believe, as journalists, we need to follow the clues that are surfacing and figure out how to solve the challenges of lost readers, lack of credibility, and yes, even journalism that is not serving the public as well as it could. For all of these carry an ethical component.

Where to start? I think it’s best to think of approaching this new media ecosystem as though you were reporting a major trend story.

Here’s a snapshot of where I’m coming from. After working for 20 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I spent 10 years on the frontlines of civic journalism. We funded 120 pilot projects that tried to figure out how we could do our journalism so that it could better help citizens do their jobs as citizens: To be informed, figure out solutions to problems, be an active participant in a self-governing society. What might that journalism look like? We came up with many successful paradigms, all with elements of participation and interactivity that have become the backbone of much of new media today.

Most recently, I have spent the last six years moving that knowledge into the digital arenas. My center, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism has been on the frontlines both of rewarding new kinds of content with the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism and also funding new kinds of content with our NNew Voices grants.

Last year, for the first time in the history of the Knight-Batten Awards, the winner of the $10,000 top prize was not a mainstream news organization or journalist but rather a nontraditional, nonprofit newcomer. The Grand Prize went to the Personal Democracy Forum, which created TechPresident.com and several other news ideas. Did we squirm? Yes, but only for a second. Because it was a slam dunk as far as our judges were concerned. This was a site where Republican and Democratic bloggers both weighed in and which skimmed from the Internet the online metrics of the presidential campaign - the number of photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, blog mentions on Technorati. For us, it was a clue that we needed to pay attention to news generated by non-profit groups. We needed to see where soft advocacy - in this case advocating for political participation - serves the needs of citizens.

Next week, we will announce the next 10 winners of our New Voices grants. To date, we will have funded 40 community news startups and tracked what they are doing, why and how. Here’s what we’ve learned with some observations into how it intertwines with journalism ethics.

What types of people want to start up a hyperlocal news site in their community? Do they have some kind of personal agenda, or, worse, some vendettas?

We find that they tend to be literate, passionate about their town, and very much yearning for a sense of place. They’re the ones who are paying attention in their communities. They either have little available media or media that is unsatisfactory. They generally have had journalism done to them, often by reporters parachuting in to cover an episodic tragedy or crime.

They are people like Maureen Mann, a former schoolteacher and friend of the Deerfield Library, who was one of our first grantees in 2005. She and a group of about a dozen people found they had no idea who was running for local office. The town didn’t send them the information until mid-February. The deadline for signing up to be a candidate was the end of January.

This group of Deerfield volunteers, underdog Democrats in a mostly Republican town, could have been considered troublemakers. Instead, they have gone on to fulfill their aspiration of creating a local newspaper. They now publish 37 original stories a week, get local ads, have some 200 contributors in a community of only 7,000 households. They read everything that comes in before posting it online. Voter turnout has gone up, even before Barack and Hillary came on the scene, and the number of empty ballot positions went down.

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