Hi: I'm Doreen Marchionni (Ph.D. '09, Missouri School of Journalism). I'll be your intergalactic pilot on this journey through my dissertation. Send whiskey, please.
Why care about the public anyway? You may have noticed Romenesko abuzz a few months back over what mainstream newsrooms should do about online story commenting, especially despicable or asinine speech. Newsrooms are waking up to the reality that online audiences appear to want to participate in the news. One way citizens can do that is through feedback/discussion rolls on stories.
Yet journalists rightly struggle with both the propriety and legality of unfettered feedback, even from named sources. This question generated lots of discussion a few months ago when I shared my dissertation data with my old newsroom family at The Seattle Times.
A couple thoughts. Citizens can participate in the news in myriad ways. The least interesting and influential is after-the-fact commenting once a story runs or airs. And, yet, this kind of reactive conversation seems to pre-occupy mainstream newsrooms. I’d suggest you turn commenting off, or at least closely guard it. Most newsrooms already use software to keep noxious people at bay or alert editors to offensive language. Nothing in the Constitution says you ought to tolerate idiots.
My bigger concern is that all of this gets in the way of thinking about conversational journalism as a proactive processs. And that notion has deep roots in American democratic theory and in media philosophy, from the foundings of the republic to the philosophy of Pragmatism to contemporary media theorists such as the late James Carey.
These scholars offer a vision of democracy, and journalism, as highly deliberative and collaborative. (For a wonderful history, see Altschull’s From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas Behind American journalism.) The fiery American revolutionary Paine and the French philosophes Voltaire and Rousseau, among others, celebrated everyday people’s stories. They told us the voices of ordinary people in everyday discourse count –– they count in the construction of community knowledge and they count in democratic rule. In many ways, they make us realize that conversation is the great equalizer in a democracy because we all do it.
Professional journalists, of course, have the unique responsibility as conversation facilitators because of their mass audience. Probably no one understood this more than Pragmatist John Dewey. In 1927, he offered a view of citizens in The Public and Its Problems as active collaborators with journalists on news, rather than passive subjects of “governing elites” who know what is best for them, as his intellectual nemesis Walter Lippmann argued at the time. Some think Lippmann ultimately won, citing the corporatization and professionalization of news.
Maybe. But I think the Internet is giving power back to the people. It’s the most important trend in journalism in the 21st century. And journalism as a conversation, as my own research found, gets at the heart of it.
