Almost 2400 educators and practitioners of journalism and mass communication in the US came to Boston on August 5th to a conference with uncharacteristic urgency. According to some long time attenders, the 97 year old Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is about as unchanging as a denominational church convention, but this time many of the 365 presentations, given over five days, were like in-service training for emergency personnel. Despite years of resistance, which has frustrated some attenders, the AEJMC acknowledged the prophets of past events: because, now it’s undeniable, the digital revolution has turned the media industry quite literally upside down, and inside out. Many experts in past practice seem lost in the new landscape.
Information that once had a price is now free. So how do those who bring us the news get to eat?
News agendas once set by elite editorial staff at major outlets are now subject to breaking news that can’t be controlled or owned, as it’s reported ad hoc by eyewitnesses at the scene. Then follows the commentary of hundreds of thousands of internet bloggers. Our choice of news channel is now mind-boggling. But who can we trust to tell it truthfully?
Once major firms employed armies of investigative reporters, more and more now the reporters must be entrepreneurial experts, and form collaborative enterprises with small niche news services. So, in the wash-up, which of them can provide resource and staff to be watchdogs against corruption in our social institutions? And these are just a few of the as yet unanswered questions raised by the new playing field for media.
It was a theme expressed by many of the newmedia experts: if you’re not confused by it then you’re not paying attention to it, and perhaps, in denial. But the encouraging subtext of the huge attendance and the various seminars confronting the issues of the information technologies is that many wise hearts and minds are now focused intensely on the issue.
In the midst of confusion, it was heartening to find people like Dan Gillmor and Tom Kennedy as people pleased with the apparent chaos in the field of journalism. They see it as a great societal opportunity and point out the exponential increase of citizens participating in the process of news-gathering, and dissemination. Citizens now more directly choose the topics for media discussion.
Kennedy also spoke of the equal opportunity environment for visual communicators who have long been marginalized and under resourced by the bosses of print centric media.
And it’s affecting Universities and Colleges. This morning, over breakfast, I spoke with the dean, of a college of communication, at a large mid western University and was surprised to find that over the past two years his institution’s robust response to the upside down world its students must face, has been to scrap the old curriculum and create a wholly new multidisciplinary approach to journalism, and communication that includes the departments teaching marketing and computer science. This will be press released in the fall, so ’til then the school remains anonymous.
The dean anticipated the counsel of Gillmor and Kennedy to the forum of educators. Journalism and Communication schools must lead industry. They must not look to be led by an industry that has proven too slow in its response to Web 2.0. Feisty editors, as oracles of all things newsworthy, are past tense, dying off and disappearing. Controlled information flow is extinct. Editors must now be collaborators and facilitators of news flow.
As Gillmor said at a Tuesday night plenary Q & A session – where else can the kind of experimentation that is needed now take place with such a pool of talent other than in our colleges and universities. And there, it needs to be a multidisciplinary approach. Kennedy called such an approach an ecosystem that includes entrepreneurial business management. Gillmor agreed and suggested training computer programmers as journalists so journalists might have intelligible conversations and partner with them as necessary to a team that is inventing and creating digital communication language.
Gillmor has established the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Kennedy’s stellar career with National Geographic and the Washington Post make him a genuine statesmen for the development of visual language in the digital world. Everything seems counterintuitive now.
Harold S. Lewis, the Business Development Officer for the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University who leads a double life as a professor at the same institution, had strong words for the non-profit sector that he saw giving away their extraordinary investigative work to the so called legacy media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times. Business management he re-iterated must be woven into the new structures – for gain even as non-profit – because without financial independence, how will the journalism be sustained?