Take the High Road—And Share It

by Jane B. Singer

Discussions of the future of news tend to get entangled in considerations of the future of particular delivery vehicles. This seems to me to miss the point; the function of news matters a whole lot more than its form. And whether or not media companies continue to print or telecast concrete, discrete news packages, experts say (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2005), "The Web--and a converged multimedia news environment--seem more clearly than ever to be journalism's future."

This future matters enormously to a democracy based on civic knowledge, discourse and participation. There is plenty of cause for concern. As David Mindich points out in Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News (2005), a majority of young Americans (following their parents' dubious lead) are clueless about the way our nation works in either theory or daily practice. "If a citizenry unilaterally abandons political knowledge, it relinquishes power as well," he reminds us. "Government supported by an uninformed citizenry is not a democracy; it is a sham" (p. 127).

But such a fate is not inevitable as the Internet becomes an increasingly dominant media form. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study during the 2004 campaign (Horrigan, Garrett, & Resnick, 2004), for instance, found online users were widely aware of opposing political views, suggesting they used the medium to seek a range of arguments rather than only those they agreed with.  Another recent study found that people who use the Internet for news also are likely to be politically engaged, as well as that talking about politics online leads to a more thorough understanding of political information (Harding and Scheufele, 2005).   Just as we suspected: It's not Lippmann OR Dewey, it's Lippmann AND Dewey.

This seamless combination of information plus communication about information is the core of the Internet's potential significance as a news medium as well as a vehicle for civic engagement. But as innumerable experts have pointed out, the key will be what news producers and news consumers - to the diminishing extent that they are distinguishable from one another - choose to do with that potential. My background is as a journalist, so I'll focus here on traditional news producers and offer two bits of advice (or perhaps wishes) for the road ahead. They will sound familiar; a great many other media observers and practitioners are saying the same thing.

One: Take the high road. The low road - a "news" product stuffed with a civically useless, cognitively disorienting jumble of crime, celebrities and cute children (or animals) - is a sure path to oblivion. It may attract revenue and even a few gawkers in the short term, but the long-term costs will wash away any negligible gains for all involved, most importantly for the people who rely on journalists for the information they need to be free and self-governing (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001).   The Internet has made irreversible a long-term media trend allowing us to get whatever we want whenever we want it, free or at minimal incremental cost. We all want to be entertained - amused, soothed, distracted, titillated -- some of the time. We hardly lack options for meeting those desires. But we all want and need to be informed some of the time, too, and serious journalism must be there for those times. People looking for information who find only infotainment will figure, quite rationally, that they might as well stick with the more entertaining entertainment.

That said, entertainment offers lessons for journalists and news organizations. Reality shows, for instance, work because they are about real people and at least pretend to be about those people's unstaged reactions to actual events. Important stories about real people have always engaged other real people (call them, say, citizens), and those stories make good journalism. Journalists can especially rejoice in their new freedom from the need to record what transpires at pseudo-events, leaving it up to the people who stage them to get their own messages out. In an online universe, after all, everyone can be a publisher. Have at it. The journalist, freed of stenographic duty, can focus on the more valuable function of imbuing those events with a multi-faceted, multi-voiced perspective that can provide citizens with a basis for meaningful action.

Which brings me to the second piece of advice for journalists journeying into the future: Share the road. The notion of gate-keeping is so 20 th century; we live in a media environment in which there simply is no gate around information (or misinformation or disinformation). Attempting to control what gets "out there" is futile, and endlessly chasing it is a perpetual losing game of catch-up.

People growing up with the Internet expect their media - including their news media - to be participatory. We are in the middle of an explosion of "we media," taking the form of blogs, podcasts, wikis, citizen journalism sites such as OhMyNews and more. The future for journalists is tied not only to how well they inform citizens but how well they encourage and enable civically oriented conversation among those citizens (Bowman and Willis, 2003)—Lippmann plus Dewey, again.

Journalists and news organizations face immediate and crucial choices in what they do with this technologically enabled shift. As little as two or three years ago, their primary response was to offer "discussion forums" on their web sites, virtual ghettoes where users could talk amongst themselves about topics such as politics but had no way to make any meaningful contribution to the news product. By the 2004 election, there were signs that news outlets were moving away from this limited conceptualization of interactivity and toward one in which journalists still provide reliable information but also integrate options for users to contribute to or personalize it. For instance, in a study of online newspapers' campaign coverage, I found that nearly four times as many editors cited blogs and such personalization features as ballot builders or candidate matches as sources of pride than cited their sites' message boards or chat areas (Singer, 2005).

Those are baby steps, but in the right direction. Journalists are not competing with "citizen journalists" for the same turf. Journalistic resources, reporting skills and, in particular, ethical commitments to such niceties as balance and fairness - assets backed by news organizations with a reputation to protect - will continue to be vital. We will continue to need journalists to fulfill a watchdog role whose effectiveness rests on their reporting plus the power of their institutional clout. But merely providing information leaves us with Lippmann minus Dewey, particularly given the decline in news consumption among the general public and, in particular, the young (Mindich, 2005).

Because news consumers are also news producers, journalists must seek ways to involve them in creating information that matters. The Internet generation is being socialized by a medium that instantly satisfies every personal whim. Facilitating and encouraging direct personal involvement in the news, including conversation about it, may well be the only way to maintain the interest of people growing up immersed in a fundamentally participatory medium that offers unlimited opportunities for both information (of one sort or another) and communication. Journalists should get into the business of offering opportunities for people to engage with civically important information as an alternative to the options offered by vapid entertainment. Not everyone will take advantage of those opportunities, but some will, some of the time. If no such opportunities exist, people will continue to talk, but not necessarily knowledgeably and not necessarily about anything of civic significance. Our democracy will disintegrate into an inane version of Dewey minus Lippmann.

Importantly, though, sharing the road does not mean giving up driving altogether. It means altering one's driving habits. The end of the gatekeeping era means the journalist's role changes, becoming less about getting us from point to point - connecting us with information, as in the top-down media environment of the past - and more about explaining what is interesting, relevant or useful about the points we have reached, the information we have encountered. Journalists must continue to exercise and strengthen this sense-making role in the evolving media environment, providing the context we need to make well-informed rather than poorly informed or misinformed decisions.

In order to do that, they have to listen to more voices than can be found in the current media echo chamber. The credible, verified, non-partisan and civically relevant information that journalists of tomorrow will continue to provide must come from more diverse places than it does today. Lots of people know lots of things; many of them already are sharing that knowledge online. Journalists should enable those voices to be heard, not only through participatory options but also as sources in traditionally reported stories. Share the road.

So my take on what news will look like in the 2030s is part guess, part hope. The guess, and this seems a reasonably sturdy limb to go out on, is that it will be a much more open co-production than in the past. The hope is that tomorrow's journalists will use new media forms wisely and well both to provide credible, civically importance information and to foster discussion of it.

Jane Singer is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa.

REFERENCES

Bowman, Shayne and Chris Willis. (2003) "We Media: How Audiences Are Shaping the Future of News and Information," The Media Center at the American Press Institute (September 21). Available online at http://www.mediacenter.org/mediacenter/research/wemedia.

Hardy, Bruce W. and Dietram Scheufele. (2005) "Examining Differential Gains from Internet Use: Comparing the Moderating Role of Talk and Online Interactions," Journal of Communication 55, 71-84.

Horrigan, John, Kelly Garrett, and Paul Resnick. (2004) "The Internet and Democratic Debate," Pew Internet & American Life Project (October 27). Available online at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/141/report_display.asp.

Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel. (2001) The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Crown Publishers.

Mindich, David T.Z. (2005) Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News. New York: Oxford University Press.

Project for Excellence in Journalism. (2005) "Online: Intro," The State of the News Media 2005. Available online at http://stateofthenewsmedia.org/2005/narrative_online_intro.asp?cat=1&media=3.

Singer, Jane B. (2005) "Stepping Back from the Gate: Online Newspaper Editors and the Co-Production of Content in Campaign 2004." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; San Antonio, August 2005.

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