Journalism as a Conversation

Sally McMillan: If Sheizaf Rafaeli begged scholars to take interactivity seriously, McMillan helped give them tools to do so. In an oft-cited essay in the book* pictured here, she catalogued the different ways scholars use “interactivity” and defined distinct traditions of academic literature to go with them. This is super big thinking for Internet theorists, and scholars interested in any aspect of communication that involves interactivity, such as journalism-as-a-conversation, owe a world of debt to her.

* The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences of ICTs is dense, academic reading but worth the effort. Terrific, comprehensive look at online interaction, thanks to editors Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone.

Jurgen Habermas: His writings are about as tough to understand as anything you’ll read in political theory. But Habermas (pictured here courtesy Wikipedia) popularized one giant concept in journalism that keeps giving: public sphere. It’s the idea that democracies contain spheres (literal or virtual) in which citizens freely debate issues that may lead to political action. Journalists occupy a unique status in those spheres: They have the power to convey those ideas back to society. As such, the public and journalists are bound up in the same important endeavor, something proponents of conversational journalism are keen to note.

Previously

Sheizaf Rafaeli*: Long before others, Rafaeli (pictured here courtesy Wikipedia) urged media scholars to take interactivity — in fact, everything about the Internet — seriously. His ground-breaking 1988 essay on the issue in Advancing Communication Science: Merging Mass and Interpersonal Processes defined interactivity as not just feedback (think of a letter-to-an-editor with no response from the editor) but transactional communication — back and forth communication between parties. Together with the equally wonderful Fay Sudweeks, he spent much of the 1990s refining the concept of interactivity, reminding us that it’s the defining characteristic of the Internet. And, as my own data showed, a critical feature of conversational journalism.

* Confession: I adore Rafaeli, though we’ve never met. Several years ago as a doc student, I sent him an e-mail halfway across the world to Israel for guidance on my work on conversational journalism. Not only did he respond immediately but with smart, deep suggestions — he even encouraged me to seek him out if I needed anymore more help. He responded the same way when I contacted him last month asking for a photograph. If you know anything about academics, you’d understand how profoundly rare it is to encounter such a gracious and giving scholar, particularly toward strangers. In my mind, he’s the equivalent in computer nerddom of Woz, minus the ridiculous Segway polo and “Dancing with the Stars.” Brilliant. Beloved. Immensely approachable.

Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass: In theory at least, the Internet allows real communication between the public and journalists in real time with the greatest of ease, potentially en masse thanks to crowd-sourcing tools such as Twitter. That’s conversational journalism to a tee. But who says that kind of communication will work anyway? Reeves* (pictured left above) and Nass (pictured right, middle, in photo by Lorenzo Wood, courtesy Flickr) point the way in their exploration of how people communicate with and through computers in The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. As it turns out, it all works quite well because people essentially treat computers as though they were human. (Given I’ve been known to keep warm in bed with my laptop, I could have told you that!)

* Professor Reeves gave me permission to include this photo from his page at Stanford. Good guy. Nice pix.

John Dewey: A philosopher and seriously deep thinker, he’s best known for The Public and Its Problems, a mini-treatise on repairing what he described in the 1920s as the “eclipsed public” in American democracy. He’s best known for his debates with scholar Walter Lippmann over whether power in society ought to rest with ordinary people or educated elites (Dewey was firmly on the side of ordinary people, informed on issues of the day with the help of the press and solid public education). In my estimation, Dewey also elevated the role of chitchat and the voice of everyday people in sustaining a democracy and, by extension, the news. (Photo courtesy Wikipedia).

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.)

Les Philosophes, a.k.a Voltaire and Rousseau: Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers borrowed many of their ideas about personal freedoms from the French, including Voltaire and Rousseau (pictured here respectively). Sure, Voltaire sometimes viewed the masses as a rabble of uncouth miscreants. But where he and others of his mindset stand tall is in their unwavering insistence that writers (including journalists) focus not on the customs of kings but of ordinary people. And, if possible, to write in their voices.

Thomas Paine:  Yes, he’s best known in the American colonies for being a revolutionary loudmouth. But the focus in his diatribes against the British was always clear: making sure power rested with the people, not with big institutions or government, with plenty o’ free expression. It’s hard to imagine the citizen side of journalist-citizen collaborations in conversational journalism without this.

All pictures courtesy Wikipedia

You’d think from all of the talk in recent years about journalism as a conversation that it’s new, maybe an Internet creation or fad. It’s not.

The concept stretches back at least as far as the Founding Fathers and their inspiration, the French Enlightenment philosophers, including Voltaire and Rousseau. You can hear it in the writings of the American revolutionary Thomas Paine and the philosopher John Dewey. You get a sense of it from many of our contemporaries, including political theorist Jurgen Habermas and Stanford’s famed experimental methodologists Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass.

Mind you, conversational journalism doesn’t always have a name in their works. It’s what scholars call an “embedded concept” — walks, talks, acts like the thing we’re interested in (conversational journalism) but without a specific linguistic reference. No matter. Good theorizing involves looking across far-flung fields at how Big Thinkers treat ideas, with or without names, then giving the object of your affection a name, often with features, or variables, it consists of.

In academia, we call this journey “explicating.” It’s damn labor intensive but also one of the most important things we do. As a Gen-Xer, I kind of see the effort as equivalent to creating Internet mash-ups, bringing together seemingly unrelated stuff to produce a shiny, new thing that just plain works.

So, on occasion, I’ll use this blog to introduce you to what I consider the “playas” of important thinkers in conversation’s journey across the world of ideas, usually just a few at a time. It’s important to note the academics in this crowd consist of qualitative and quantitative methodologists. I like that. I don’t believe you can ever fully understand a thing either by ignoring numbers or reducing the universe to them.

And without further ado, some of my heroes:

Rob Anderson, Robert Dardenne and George Killenberg: These gentlemen wrote the definitive work on conversational journalism, The Conversation of Journalism: Communication, Community, and News, but they don’t always get the credit they deserve. I especially like how they connect the idea to Dewey and other followers of 19^th-century American Pragmatism, the only philosophical movement the U.S. has produced and the one most associated with American journalism.

James Carey: This renown journalism scholar probably is best known for talking about journalism as cultural ritual than machine-like data transmission. But he also wrote a seminal essay in 1992 in The Kettering Review before the rise of the Internet, describing journalism as a conversation the way most of us think of it today. Go forward-thinking!