2008 Ruhl Lecture
Participatory Media
Challenges to the Conventions of Journalism

Jan Schaffer
J-Lab Executive
Director

Ruhl Lecture,
University of Oregon
School of Journalism
and Communication,
May 8, 2008

If mainstream journalists go to a meeting where everyone agrees, we all know that it’s likely our editors will go on automatic pilot and say there’s no story there.

What does this say about the ethics of a journalism that defines “conflict” as news, but does not validate consensus? Do we even know how to render consensus as journalism?

Citizen media makers will report a meeting chronologically and just tell it like it is. They don’t worry about whether that’s going to be interesting or whether a story has a narrative arc.

Such a practice earned the scorn recently of one blogger, who denounced a Huffington Post entry as so boring “it never should have run.” The Huffington writer filed 1,400 words, three minutes of audio and a 480-word transcript.

Her post concerned comments Barack Obama made about poorer voters at a meeting of wealthy donors. The writer, an Obama donor, attended the meeting.

But she blew the lead, asserted the writer of the blog called History Eraser Button. It wasn’t until the 28th sentence that she reported that, “Obama made a problematic judgment call in trying to explain working class culture to a much wealthier audience.”

“Yes!” said the blogger. “That’s your lead. Sell it! Get people fired up! Don’t waste your readers’ time.”

I ask you: When, in the effort to make our stories interesting, do we fan the flames of controversy? When do we make civil discourse impossible or drive it underground? When are we so relentlessly keeping score - which candidate messed up today? Who bested the other? - that we lose touch with our readers, who don’t really care about the score. They just want their leaders to address and solve problems.

So what do we do with all these new players who don’t seem to want to play by our rules? How dare they occupy our space?

Last year, we funded two projects at the University of Montana journalism school to start up hyperlocal sites in the small town of Dutton and on the nearby Crow reservation. When the publisher of the Big Horn County News in Hardin, Mont., learned about CrowNews.net he was quoted in the Missoula Independent as saying this: “Competition. Competition for news. Competition for attention. Competition for the aspect of being the primary news source in the county. The only thing we have to sell is news and readership. The fewer readers we have the less valuable our paper is to advertisers.”

While it might be all well and good that the journalism school was trying to train journalists on the ground, he said, “They are sending them out to undermine and destroy the very newspapers that will be hiring them.”

Those are fighting words. Is it only those of us who belong to the official tribe of journalists who have the purity of intent and the rigor of ethics to serve our communities? Once upon a time, I might have agreed with that. But it is no longer so clearcut for me.

What doesn’t exist yet, but I hope to help build, are real, operating examples of how things could be different for both Big Horn County News and CrowNews.net. J-Lab hopes to be able to show how news organizations could begin constructing an overarching local “info-structure,” one that would support new definitions of “news,” new participants in content creation and interaction, and new pathways for news and information.

While it seems like partnerships (and outright acquisitions) are happening in many media arenas, we don’t see many partnerships between mainstream and citizen media. Indeed, we actually see newspapers either denouncing citizen sites in their backyards as unfair competition or unethical or ignoring them entirely and building parallel efforts.

Some smart news organizations, though, are beginning to take some cues from these media developments. They are concluding it’s time for a new core mission, one that repositions the newspaper in the community and revisits knee-jerk practices.

I believe that news organizations need to construct the hubs that will enable ordinary people with passions and expertise to commit acts of news and information. Call them random (or not so random) acts of journalism, if you will. News organizations need to be on a constant lookout for the best of these efforts, trawling the blogosphere, hyperlocal news sites, nonprofits, advocacy groups, journalism schools and neighborhood listservs. Your goal is to give a megaphone to those with responsible momentum, recruit them to be part of your network, impart some core journalism values - and even help support them with micro-grants.

Ultimately, your goal is to rethink who are really the experts about that community. Is it just the heads of organizations, or people with titles, or elected officials? Or is it the people who live there day after day? What is the ethic that has ignored those voices or relegated them to the color quotes? A more responsible journalism would mine that expertise and amplify it. But first you have to find it and nurture it.

This new mission is requiring journalists to embrace new partners, validate supplemental news channels, and support - without always controlling - a vibrant local newscape. Denouncing these alternative channels of information as not “real journalism” will no longer work.

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