Today I’m attending Making Media Work, a half-day panel in Washington, which is the kickoff event for the New America Foundation’s Knight Media Policy Initiative. (You may remember the announcement that they were hiring part-time fellows a few months back.) It should be an interesting discussion; for starters, the talk today is already starting to break down the cast of “usual suspects” we normally see at these sorts of events, but I also think the NAF initiative has the potential to become a big deal in the journalism policy world. I’ll be sure to let you know if anything interesting happens (and see my full disclosure, below).

For now, though, I wanted to share some thoughts that have been triggered by the excellent research of two of the presenters today, Tracy van Slyke and Jessica Clark over at Beyond the Echo, as well as by a recent post by Josh Wilson at the Save the News blog. What do Clark, van Slyke, and Wilson all have in common? In a few words, they see the future of journalism not in terms of “newspapers vs. bloggers” or “old media vs. new media” or even “Demand Media vs. Everyone.” Rather, they see the future as a question of institutions and networks. Regular readers of my blogging here will know I’ve been thinking, writing, and blogging about journalistic institutions and networks for years. And the startup of the initiative at the New America has got me thinking about the intersection of public policy and networked forms of journalistic work. Keep reading »

When I was trying to come up with a conclusion to my doctoral research on local journalism, I penned these thoughts:

The internet has deeply problematized local journalism’s vision of its public…Online, all publics appear fragmentary. There is always an element of the public that cannot be networked. There is always a fraction of this uncaptured public only a mouse-click away…Insofar as journalistic authority rests on its claim to give the public flesh, such a claim is no longer tenable — if it ever was. Insofar as local journalism’s image of the public is grounded in a vision that sees the public as a unitary, structural, or even interlocking entity that journalism can either confidently speak to or call into being, the authority of journalism has become deeply problematic.

The questions about newspaper paywalls, then, are more than simply economic questions. They are more than simply questions about “will the model work?” and “can we balance the ratio between clicks and advertising dollars that maximizes our paywall’s effectiveness?” There are also questions about how journalists see themselves, and whether they can live with the answers that a paywall provides.

In its article claiming that The New York Times was “close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, [through the kind of] the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe,” New York Magazine took a trip back in time to the days of TimesSelect, the Times’ last major attempt to charge readers for content: Keep reading »

I’ve helped organize a lot of future of journalism conferences this year, and have done some research for a few policy-oriented “future of journalism” white papers. And let’s face it: as Alan Mutter told On the Media this weekend, we’re edging close to the point of extreme rehash.

This isn’t to say there won’t be more such confabs, or that I won’t be attending most of them; journalists (blue-collar and shoe-leather types that they are) may not realize that such “talking” is actually the lifeblood of academia, for better or worse. However, as 2009 winds down, I do think that it might be worthwhile to try to summarize a few of the things we’ve more or less figured out this year, and point towards a few of the newer topics I see looming on the horizon. In other words, maybe there are some new things we should be having conferences about in 2010.

In the first section of this post, I summarize what I think we “kinda-sorta” learned over the past year. In the next, I want to point us towards some of the questions we should be asking in 2010. Keep reading »

The recent news that the Senate reached a compromise on the passage of a federal shield law for journalists — a compromise that appears to extend shield coverage to bloggers and freelance journalists as well as more “traditional reporters — reminded me of some interesting findings in one of my unpublished academic papers. (The fact that the paper remains unpublished should be a warning that there was still some work to do in the analysis; nevertheless, I think it stands up.) The goal of the paper was to determine whether, during early media coverage of attempts to pass a journalistic shield law (May to December 2007), bloggers and traditional newspaper reporters framed the story differently, and if so, how.

I was interested in the framing of this story, but for a particular reason. I wanted to understand whether bloggers and journalists used their framing of the shield law debate to advance the interests of their own occupational groups. Passing a shield law inevitably involves defining who counts as a journalist, and bloggers and journalists would each seem to have an interest in drawing that line differently. Did conflicting occupational interest affect the way that bloggers and journalists framed the story? Did bloggers, for instance, focus more on the question of “who counted” as a journalist? Were they more likely to criticize bills that did not endorse a broad definition of who the shield law protected? Did traditional newspaper reporters do more day-to-day reporting on the story? Did they argue that the law should not cover blogs? And so on.

What makes this paper so interesting was that the results were a little different than I expected, but in an intriguing way. As I wrote in the paper: Keep reading »

Having spent more than three years doing dissertation research on the changing journalistic ecosystem in Philadelphia, I was excited to see Technically Philly get a great write up last week. And having spent the past six months as a research assistant with the Downie-Schudson report on reconstructing American journalism, I see a connection between Technically Philly, CUNY’s New Business Models For News, and the report. The nub of the connection has to do with building stronger news networks and deciding on the network ties we allow ourselves to utilize when we build them.

The ultimate story of my dissertation research — as much as I didn’t want it to be — had to do with the unraveling of a once-dominant Philadelphia news network, Philadelphia Media Holdings (a.k.a. the newspapers — see the latest on their bankruptcy here), and the simultaneous failure to build new local news networks in the city. While we often hear a lot about news-network successes, we don’t here as much about their fragility and the obstacles that lie in the way of building them. (See this tweet by Jay Rosen about the “lifecycle of hyper-local” for another example.)

Watching the emerging news void in Philadelphia, which grew despite many valiant attempts to fill it, was a sobering lesson for me on the promise and limits of the new networked news ecology. Keep reading »

The announcement of The Washington Post’s new social media policy prompted the usual round of sniping between old and new media partisans. (For a good overview of the back and forth, see this post by my Lab colleague Mathew Ingram.)

The battle lines on this debate are fairly well defined — at this point, I don’t see a whole lot of point in rehashing them again here. But the dustup did make me wonder how other “truth-seeking professions” handled their members’ engagement in the public realm, and how and why journalism might be the same or different. Specifically, what intrigued me most was this line from the Post’s social media guide:

All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.

Now, I know for a fact that no professor at my current university, the College of Staten Island/CUNY, would ever expect that their job required them to “relinquish some of the privileges of a private citizen.” And yet I’m in a profession whose ostensible mission is the same as that of journalism: to seek out the truth in a fair (dare we say “objective”) way, and communicate that truth to others. Right? So why the distinction?

Indeed, the entire early history of academic professionalization was structured around issues of “academic freedom,” the ability of professors to think and write what they wanted, in public, without fear of losing their jobs. Many academics, in fact, lament the fact that they aren’t able to engage with the public more. From the little research I’ve done, most of the debate surrounding lawyers’ use of blogs and twitter revolves around questions of commercial vs. non-commercial speech and client disclosure, not public dialog per se. Scientists — certainly truth seekers! — are often encouraged to participate in public debates about scientific discovery. I don’t know much about how churches handle priests and ministers who blog or use Twitter, but I’d be curious to learn more.

So an interesting way to approach the question of journalistic use of Twitter might be to consider: Why am I, a professor of journalism, encouraged to blog, tweet, and engage in public dialog about journalism, but still trusted to speak the “truth,” while journalists are not? Why am I not required to “relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens” in order to do my job well? Why am I allowed to get up in front of a classroom everyday and teach youngsters how to “do journalism,” while journalists themselves have to give up some of the personal privileges of private citizens? What is it about journalistic professionalism that demands the monk-like embrace of personal rectitude?

In my last post, I spent a lot of time laying out a fairly abstract framework for how we can think intelligently about future kinds of news organizations. I argued they could be usefully evaluated and charted on four factors: the type of work they do, how institutionalized they are, how many resources they have, and how open they are to outsiders.

But the value of any model lies not in its elegance, but in the degree to which it can help us think about the world in a useful way — the way it can give us “tools to think with,” as the saying goes — and can help us solve practical problems.

Note that by “solve practical problems” I don’t simply mean “figure out a business model for journalism.” Business models are important — but questions like “what kind of journalism best integrates with the nature of 21st-century democracy and society?” are also practical problems. So in this post I want to apply the model to a few real new organizations, describe what problems I think it might help us solve, and answer a few questions raised by my previous post.

I think this model is useful because it can help us describe not only the way things are but also the way people think things are. That’s what I mean to get across in this first chart. In the early day of the read-write web, and even to an unfortunate degree today, journalists often tended to think of themselves as members of institutionalized, resource-rich, closed organizations that “did reporting.” In other words, as professionals. The stereotype about bloggers (and by extension, about all citizen journalists) was that they were completely open, ad hoc, resource-poor individuals who practiced the art of commentary (“guys in their pajamas”). Keep reading »

With the journalism and technology landscape changing literally by the hour, I often feel that one thing missing from conversations about “the future of news” is the long view. Steve Yelvington was implicitly making this point about history when he recently wrote that

…newspapers have a track record of empirical learnings that perhaps ought to be considered before jumping off into a debate about beliefs.

It’s this historical perspective that makes Scott Rosenberg’s book on blogging so valuable. I tried to bring a sense of local media history to my Philadelphia research as well.

In the summer of 2006, I published a two-part post entitled “Actually Existing Citizen Journalism Projects.” It was an attempt to sort through the noise about who counted as a journalist and trace the developments of the form during the prior decade. I don’t want to recap the entire post here, but I do want to summarize my previous thinking before I turn to more recent developments. In this post, I want to ask: How would we describe the overall arc of media history from 2006 to 2009? Keep reading »