I attended the Jay Rosen talk for the Walkley Foundation on Tuesday 17th August. This post is a brief summary and discussion of some of the points that were raised during the talk that I felt were of particular interest. As a brief introduction, Rosen is the author of the blog PressThink and is a professor of journalism at New York University (read more about Jay Rosen here).
Rosen opened with a reference to a scene from the 1976 movie Network in which a broadcaster engages with his audience by encouraging them to stick their heads out of the window and yell a mantra “I’m mad as hell, and I won’t take it anymore…” (see YouTube clip below).
This is compared to the current state of the mass media, in which viewers feel more engaged and connected with content and there is constant interaction between interested parties.Where there used to be an audience of readers, listeners & consumers, now we have an audience that is empowered to distribute and edit news through blogs, podcasting, email, YouTube and other social media.
On his blog, Rosen writes about The Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage, which looks at the concept of engaging audiences more closely in defining the types of questions that they want answered by their politicians during campaign coverage. The post looks at the development of a “Citizens Agenda”, which Rosen argues should form the basis of serious discussion between politicians, journalists and key stakeholders during the course of the campaign.
The two main themes of the talk that I found particularly interesting were the concept of “Crowd Sourcing” and “Citizen Journalism”. Crowd sourcing is essentially outsourcing labour to a large group or community by means of an open call. Rosen gave two examples of crowd sourcing. The first, by the blog TPMMuckraker, who used their audience to help trawl through 3,000 pages of emails in search of information relating to the US housing crash. The second example given was Guardian.co.uk, who used crowd sourcing to scan through thousands of pages of documents relating to the expenditure of Member’s of Parliament during the British MP’s expenses scandal. In both examples, the public’s enthusiasm for the story of the day was channeled by journalists to assist in researching and disseminating the news with a speed that would have not otherwise been possible. This also no doubt helped readers to feel more engaged in the news-making and reporting process.
Citizen Journalism is the concept of members of the public playing an active role in the creation and dissemination of news and information. It is defined by Rosen in the video below.
Individuals are now empowered to set themselves up as content creators and sharers through a wide range of new digital media. In his talk, Rosen discussed the changing media landscape, pointing to the incorporation of blogs with traditional media sources and the ‘unbundling’ of the news as more people turn to the internet for content. He gave the example of Spot.Us who funded their story on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and other stories) by soliciting donations from interested readers.
When you look at these examples, this new age of journalism seems to represent a kind of mass media utopia in which people from all angles are encouraged to participate and share knowledge (and sometimes wealth) – and in which most content is available to us free online 24/7. Rosen argues that there are positive and negatives to this new age of journalism (i.e. it makes open source journalism possible, but provides an outlet for terrorist organisations to plan and communicate). I found the talk very interesting and it gave me some new insights into the evolution of journalism and the mass media over the past few decades.
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