fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Donica Mensing | 09.28.2008

Doc Searls (via Rosen) says it’s not about Web 1.0 or 2.0 — it’s about the static Web v. the live Web.

We’ve been struggling with this for awhile. Journalism sites know they need to move from static to live. But the heart of journalism for so long — writing/creating/editing/producing — has been designed to end with a static product that has almost no shelf life. A story is written, published or broadcast, and thrown out. Over and over. All these journalism boxes are flying down the assembly line and we can’t catch them all or stack or organize them and so they end up in the bottom of bird cages.

This isn’t to say that journalism hasn’t produced life-saving stories absolutely critical to our survival. But the assembly line model is no longer reliably producing products we need. To survive, we need new analogies, models, practices. And Doc Searls points to one:

The Live Web isn’t just built. It grows, adapts and changes. It’s an environment where we text and post and author and update and tweet and syndicate and subscribe and notify and feed and — and yell and fart and say wise things and set off alarms and keep each other scared, safe or both. It’s verbs to the Static Web’s nouns. It is, in a biological word that has since gone technical, generative.

Searls links “generative” to a fascinating post by Jonathan Zittrain (The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It)  that compares the generative power of the Internet and the Apple II to the controlled preprogrammed iPhone. He concludes:

We face a constitutional moment in cyberspace, not because of a watershed moment of oppression by a sovereign, but because of difficult choices of our own making: abuse of our open network and hardware by some among us, and a resulting mass movement towards – indeed, demand for – lockdown. Our future can be kept generative only if we can continue to see the Internet’s invitation to be participants in its use, rather than consumers of it.

This echoes a struggle within journalism today. Some want to keep the lockdown mode of journalistic products because those are vetted, edited, reliable, credible. We need some solid ground to stand on somewhere. Who will do the fact checking? Who will check naked propaganda? Others are agitating for generative journalism — the Dan Gillmor/Jay Rosen “the audience knows more than we do” form of live, crowd-sourced, citizen and social media, blogging and twittering conversations that are a form of “out loud” journalism that has no beginning and no definitive end.

Theoretically we can have both. But neither has a sustainable business model at the moment and neither seem quite perfect for our present needs. Not everyone is online. Not everyone is equipped to engage in a sophisticated use of cyberspace. We need to keep generating and evolving. What do we need now, at this historical time with these historically sized problems?