SuperMedia

= on the political role of Networked Journalism

Book: SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World. Charlie Beckett. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008

Description

From the author:

"My book SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) is an attempt to move on from the rather tiresome trench warfare of "new" versus "old" media or "citizen" versus "professional" journalist. The public is now increasingly doing it for themselves. That is great. Traditional media is also showing great enterprise in going online and becoming more interactive. That is good too. The interesting question now is how these changes will inform each other. I think that the result will be a transformation of journalism production that is a much bigger and deeper challenge to the news media than it realises.

A process, not a product

As it becomes non-linear and open-sourced, journalism changes. This is about more than posting a comment on a blog or sending in a photo to a website. The claims that traditional media is made for authority, objectivity and quality will be challenged. I think that the business, moral and political case for journalism is best made when it embraces these changes. To retain value journalism must engage with the public. It must shift power from the newsroom to the connected online and digital world. It must become "networked".

We are in a world where data is vital to daily and lifetime decision-making for individuals. Interaction and analysis are crucial to community cohesion. Fluid information-flows are the lifeblood of the information-based economies emerging globally and locally. And in a complex world where multifaceted issues such as migration and climate change are both difficult and unavoidable, the media forum and its potential for dialogue and debate about such concerns is vital to a healthy public sphere.

"Networked Journalism" means opening up the production process from start to finish - and beyond. It already has the tools: email, mobile-phones, digital cameras, online editing, web-cams, texting, and remote controls. This is channelled through new communication processes like crowd-sourcing, Twitter, YouTube, and wikis as well as blogs and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV).

Networked journalism is a process not a product. The journalist still reports, edits, packages the news. But the process is continually shared. The networked journalist changes from being a gatekeeper who delivers to a facilitator who connects.

What does that mean in practice? At one level this a very practical thing that takes traditional journalism and liberates it through public participation. Take the example of the Fort Myers News Press newspaper in Florida. In the wake of hurricane Katrina the enterprising editor got her lawyers to force the Federal Emergency Management Agency to release all its data on relief payments to townspeople. The data provided was far too extensive for the paper's journalists to process. So instead they put it all online and asked their readers to do the searching. Within twenty-four hours, 60,000 searches were made throwing up all kinds of leads for the journalists to follow up and publish. Neither journalists nor public could have done this on their own. The combination of skills and resources opened up a story in a way that allowed both to challenge the authorities.

Just think about how many other ways you could exploit similar techniques to mine public knowledge. Imagine how that act of networked journalism added real value to that community. And in an era when regional newspapers in many countries (the United States included) are disappearing, I believe it offers a paradigm for established journalism to survive and thrive but with a new social role.

There will always be attempts to limit people speaking for themselves. Traditional journalists will patronise it as "anarchy" or "unprofessional" and "unreliable". Repressive authorities will recognise the challenge to their control over the established media. This is why it is so important that anyone seeking to sustain freedom of expression should seek to build networked journalism." (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/supermedia-the-networked-journalism-future)