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.
Author’s note: This is part of a continuing series on the nuts-and-bolts of my dissertation on journalism as a conversation. Where appropriate, I link back to related posts in the series.
Tumblr’s fun, yall, but time to resume posts about the dissertation proper. When I first applied to doc programs, I was torn between two life-long passions: journalism and film. I even thought about combining the two and dissertating about depictions of journalists on film.
By the time I was leaving The Seattle Times to start my doctorate in 2006, the news business seemed to be in freefall: plummeting circulations, layoffs, buyouts and, soon, bankruptcies and closures. Virtually every person who said good-bye told me I’d better use my education to help figure out a solution to the problems.
That’s a tough order, but I decided to take a close look at the Internet’s impacts on mainstream media. The specific angle was virtually staring me in the face: For most of my 17 years in newspapers, I’d scratch my head over so-called “lobby calls” — readers who’d show up unannounced in the company lobby to share information with anyone from the newsroom.
I’d listen politely, but in the back of my head, I wondered: What the hell are you doing here? What makes you think you’re part of the process? I’m the journalist — it’s my job to get out the news, not yours.
My Internet buddies who’d been blogging and instant-messaging and joining user groups and social networks for years already knew the score: Those people are the answer to the media’s problems.
Days after starting school in the fall of 2006, I plopped down in my dean’s office and rambled incoherently to her about potential dissertation ideas — talked about my interest in the Internet and online news and changing definitions of news and audience participation and who’s the journalist and who’s the audience anymore and …
Before I drifted into a zone and started drooling, Esther turned to me and calmly said: “Sounds like you’re talking about journalism-as-a-conversation. Go check it out.”
I did, of course, and now it’s my life obsession, the Big Idea that fascinates and at times frustrates me. Is is everywhere and nowhere. In the academic literature, you find it scattered over myriad disciplines, often only as an unnamed, “embedded” concept. That can spell death to a scholar, especially a doc student, because so much about academia is toeing the line and supporting the status quo of well-oiled ideas. Building theory on a concept with little theorizing and little empirical data behind it meant coloring outside the lines and hoping others got it.
Fortunately, I had Esther and, later, a whole committee of big thinkers pushing me onward. Away I went …
