Newsless.org

One of my favorite insights embedded in Vin Crosbie’s excellent essay on the state of the US newspaper industry:

[Newspaper editors] came to believe that producing a common edition for everyone is their raison d’être, forgetting it arose as a limitation of their technology. Fitting psychologist Abraham Maslow’s statement that “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” the editorial production limitation of Gutenberg’s technology has led most newspaper editors to believe that they set the ‘common agenda’ for their community and likewise that their community’s readership is somehow homogenous because it reads the same newspaper edition on any given day.

It’s amazing that you still hear this canard so often in the annals of journalism. We’ve come to view the newspaper’s inability to break out of a one-size-fits-all general-interest format as a feature, not a bug. Vin provides a delicious example to illustrate the point: “The top headline on the front page of a 120,000 circulation daily published Monday was ‘Builder Gets OK for Road Change’ about an access road bordering one of dozens of shopping plazas in a New York State suburban county with 160 miles of public roads and nearly one million residents.”

Given such an example, I’d give it five minutes before Old School Journalist X is ranting about how expanded choice in media allows us to retreat into our respective ideological corners. Ten minutes max till he pulls out Bowling Alone.

I’m certainly not going to argue there’s nothing of value in the idea of a news commons. I’m as frightened as the next guy of the prospect of someone getting all her news filtered through FreeRepublic. I also don’t believe in the news commons as an inviolable democratic principle passed down to us by George Jesus Washington Christ himself, however. And there’s a very strong critique to be made of the notion that there should be a few authoritative information oracles consulted by all.

But all these arguments are quickly becoming moot. The news commons is dying a little more each day. The question before us is what we will replace it with. Which brings me to a thought-provoking paper by Mark Deuze published this summer in the International Journal of Communication, entitled “The Changing Context of News Work: Liquid Journalism and Monitorial Citizenship.”

If you’re looking for a neat treatise on how to evolve journalism for the 21st Century, look elsewhere, as Deuze himself concedes somewhere around page 13. But if you’re interested in a successor to the news commons, Deuze begins to posit a replacement:

If the old model of journalism was to push news to the masses so they could vote informed in representative democracy, the argument as outlined in this essay begs the question of how the new media ecology contributes to a new or renewed form of citizenship, and what the role of journalism in such a context would be. Whether or not one is optimistic or hopeful about the collective intelligence found online and the networked individualism offline, it seems doubtful that it is possible to call upon citizens to embrace some sense of socially cohesive purpose that is based on their social identity as centrally informed members of a mass audience: an audience of voters for politics, and an audience of consumers for journalism.

Instead of focusing on voter apathy, one could argue that democracy has arrived at its most successful stage yet: a phase where people trust or believe the political system will function regardless whether they engage with it or not. [Emphasis mine.] If democracy effectively means outsourcing governance to a political elite, it has succeeded. However, this is not exactly what is happening. Rather than voter disinterest or civic disengagement, we see another, more anti-hierarchical and deeply individualized type of citizenship emerging. This is the attitude of the citizen-consumer.

Just today, I gave a talk in which I mentioned that our information landscape had changed drastically, and so the role of journalism has to change. Typically, I throw a line in there about how media literacy is becoming much more important, and how we need to empower citizens with better tools for telling stories and evaluating information. But the changing role of a citizen in a democracy is even more fundamental. We should consider this central to the question of a successor to the news commons.

Related posts:

1. A little history For some time now, I’ve been thinking and writing about...
2. News after Newspapers: The CIA spies the future of journalism I'm remiss in not having linked to this Martin Langeveld...