Journalism as a Conversation

Dan Gillmor: If any journalism professor deserves an award for pushing conversational journalism into public consciousness these days, it’s Gillmor.* Nothing is implied or insinuated in his seminal We the Media: Grassroots Journalism, by the People, for the People. He used the term “journalism as a conversation” explicitly in the kind of collaborative contexts we’ve come to understand it by. As we already know, there’s great power and promise in naming a thing.

* Yes, I’m fully aware his over-exposure turns some people off, and I’ve railed against excessive self-promotion many times on this site. But I ask you to set aside any biases to consider the prescience of his life’s work. He saw this conversation thing coming long before anyone else, and I’m quite excited to be using We the Media as one of the core texts for my conversation class this fall. (The other core text, the bible of conversation, is Anderson, Dardenne and Killenberg’s The Conversation of Journalism: Communication, Community, and the News.)