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August 27, 2009
In an earlier post I mentioned that I had taken time out from my photography to prepare for, attend and speak at the Future of Journalism debate in Adelaide on Monday night. The Adelaide forum happened just after the Perth one, and Tama Lever gives a good round up of that discussion, which was designed to ease journalists to step outside Fortress journalism. As Lever says news journalists in Australia are trying to figure out new, sustainable ways of plying their trade in the digital age.
Entitled a “Blueprint for progress”, the forum was organized by the Media Alliance & Walkley Foundation I never used my speech notes. My initial response to the Adelaide forum can be found in an update to the earlier post. Instead I signed up to twitter.
I was on the second panel chaired by Jonathan Este the Media Alliance’s director of communication, along with Collette Snowdon from the University of South Australia; Garry Jaffer, managing director of OMD South Australia (a media planning and advertising buying agency); and Paul Hamra, the editor and publisher of the Independent Weekly.
The panel's brief was to look into the future after the first panel of Fortress journalists had explored the changes (multi-tasking, automation, working across media) taking place in the workplace of the commercial and noncommercial print and television media institutions. The premise of the discussion was that the journalism v blogger conflict is over.
I am not going to discuss the set pieces --ie., the interviews with Tim Burrowes from mUmBrella and Stephen Brook from Media Guardian. Both talked about the world outside the citadel but the link of the new to democracy was very tenuous. What could be inferred from the set pieces is that the press had grown accustomed to silence on its fundamental aims and purposes, and that is why there is little discussion about the relationships between democracy, citizenship, public life and journalism in Australia. The inference was that such discussions were for the campus and professors, despite journalism's obvious stake in the public sphere.
One issue that surfaced through the forum was the difficulty traditional journalists were experiencing in adjusting to a digital world. This involved stepping outside the traditional journalism model to a more conversational mode of writing, using the new social media technologies of blogging, Facebook, Twitter and Flicker in the public sphere. The problem was technology, even though there is little doubt that social media is becoming a crucial part of our mediated lives.
There was a high degree of anxiety about the new technologies, despite journalists blogging, being on Facebook, and using twittering extensively. Obviously, the Media Alliance union needs to run some upskilling courses to show its members how to feel comfortable using these new technologies, and so help them to step outside Fortress journalism and start experimenting in writing journalism differently. The issue is not technology per se--it is writing journalism differently.
The fortress model is where journalism is criticized by all and in conversation with none; conventions of the craft are defended as first principles; and journalism's business is information or facts not weighty reflections. That is for professors. Journalism inside the fortress just tells it as it is, interpretation (partisan advocacy) is left to others, and it is agnostic and indifferent to policy outcomes. Therein lies a problem.
Another issue, and one not seriously discussed, was what is is to done with these tools once journalists have learned how to use them? What are they to be used for? The assumption is that they will be used in newsrooms even though these newsroom are downsizing. So where do the laid off journalists go? What do they do? Do they become independents in an emerging network culture, but are unable to make enough money online to live on. How then does the new digital technology help journalists to work outside the citadel of Fortress journalism in new media institutions?
The idea of Public (or civic) journalism was mentioned, and it was linked to the other idea of stimulating public dialogue or deliberative discussions amongst citizens on issues of a common concern to a democratic public. How this could be done in Australia was not really explored by the panel and the audience, other than the gesture to the turn to community. In that turn journalists are not only observers but participants in our political life; and they address us in our capacity as citizens within the public sphere in a media dominated environment.
There was some sense that public journalism is an idea with academic roots that is in the process of being transplanted in the soil of civil society outside the academy and outside the walls of fortress journalism. Outside the latter because it has a deep skepticism of the capacity of citizens to engage in a public discussion (eg. the vitriol of partisan/opinionated bloggers as placeholder for the herd). What was not addressed was how Fortress journalism identifies with professionals and insiders as opposed to citizens.
In this Fortress model the journalist stands as an eyewitness describing the activities of insides to a passive public, whose job it is to vote rascals/bastards in or out. Reporters act as experts and insiders and they often act as if their audience is made up of other journalists, politicians, staffers and bureaucrats. So the media is seen to talk at the public, rather than with or even to them as part of a process of considering and addressing shared problems. The Fortress model needs to be deconstructed.
Though journalists are comfortable with the public knowing what is happening, they are definitely not comfortable with using their stories and investigations to help the public take responsibility for knowing what is going on through the learned skills of conversation, deliberation and democracy. When users claim the tools as their own, the future is mobile storytelling; gaming for social change; and mapping your city according to your needs.
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The debate about the public, public journalism and democracy that did not happen at the forum does reach back to Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion and John Dewey's response in The Public and its Problems in the 1920s.
It does not sound as if this classic exchange was unknown to the forum's participants--audience and panel. Presumably, they do not teach this kind of intellectual history at journalism school.