Thoughts on a Thesis

A thesis as to why this is necessary:

More than print or television, digital media is the future platform for the news. However, digital culture is more than just a platform. It is changing the way journalism takes shape, inviting masses of people who've never considered journalistic ethics or the consequences of distributing information to thousands of people, to become a part of the formerly small pool of gatekeeping journalists who bring the "news" to the rest of the world. The result is that the pool of those that can be counted among the "media" or "journalists" has grown dramatically. The amount of information out there has exploded. And yet, at the end of the day, people want to be able to trust that what is being purported to be news, whether it comes so-called "traditional" journalists or "citizen journalists" who are distributing their information online or through social media. Multiple cultural and technological changes have made that increasingly difficult. The rise of right wing and left wing media as well as polarizing politics has cast doubt on all forms of "mainstream media". That doubt is compounded by the ability for people to bypass any kind of "mainstream" media and go right to sources online that support their views, regardless of whether the news being distributed by that source meets even the most basic thresholds for fact. In some cases, the manipulation is subtle (like news "spin). In other cases, it is dramatic (manipulating or omitting facts to deliberately support a political or cultural agenda). Either way, it puts the onus on the journalists to fact-check their own work. For traditional journalists, the burden is heavier and more complicated. The speed of the news cycle and the sheer amount of information available to inform your reporting can overwhelm someone trying to verify the truth of the matter. It is increasingly difficult to find those who don't spin their side of the story. On the other side of the coin, many so-called "citizen journalists" may not even realize their level of responsibility to the discourse happening around the country, They can bypass traditional media and potentially reach thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people. What's more, many enjoy the ability to remain anonymous no matter what they post and thereby often avoid any kind of legal or ethical consequence for their information. As people who put information into cyberspace, we must reassess our responsibilities in doing so and as news consumers we must approach all information like this with eyes open. We, as journalists, can not pretend that the dramatic cultural and technological changes are happening outside of the sphere of what we do. The news is no longer confined to the traditional gatekeepers. The digital media has torn those gates down. Access once enjoyed by media conglomerates is now open to anyone with a twitter handle and online access. So how do we as journalists adapt to the new landscape? How do we retain our integrity? How do we use the information out there to aid in our efforts to inform our audience instead of confuse them? And how do we uphold traditional ethical and journalistic goals when they are openly flaunted by others who share our medium and threaten to denigrate what we do?

As a secondary point, we need to look at the implications of digital media when it comes to how news is distributed. This is particularly important now because even leading journalism programs tend to treat digital media as a sidebar to journalism, focusing on reporting and fact-checking and discussing blogging only in passing. All too often, the news is treated as a TV or print enterprise with a digital component. It must be re-imagined as a digital entity with text, audio and visual components. That is true both for the way we create news and how it is distributed. Educators say that the technology is changing so quickly, in fact, that they can barely keep up - that lessons developed one year may be outdated a year later. A recent study found that more than a quarter of 18 to 24 year old's use social media as their primary source for news - more than television for the first time. We must meet these viewers where they live in terms of how to deliver them accurate information quickly and in the medium they prefer. This has implications for "traditional media" because it requires us to rethink how to provide facts and contexts in a different medium than has been traditionally used, as well as how to meet ethical and legal requirements for distributing information when the speed of the news cycle and the sheer amount of information available means it may not be possible to accurately check facts or verify sources.

All of this will provide the backdrop for a comprehensive college-level course that looks at the changing landscape of "traditional journalism". It will also look at how journalism itself is transitioning to a new age in which digital media is transforming both the content and the medium by which it is provided, As it does, we must also reassess the responsibilities that lay with traditional journalists, citizen journalists and the audience they are trying to reach. Areas of interest include traditional journalistic pedagogy, evolving pedagogy, the clash between traditional & citizen journalists (including sometimes competing goals and motivations) and how the two entities can work together (including how information is co-opted through phenomena like crowdsourcing), as well as assessing ethical and legal responsibilities moving forward.

Lit Review (in progress)

Pedagogy (also courses that are currently offered)

Fire in the Hole: Curricular Explosion, Fearless Journalism Pedagogy and Media Convergence. Michael Longinow. Fall 2011 Symposium.
This presentation explores what we know and don't know about how young people are consuming media and how it informs how educators need to teach journalism. What are people looking for in the "news" they consume and why?  Does imagery trump text? Where does context fit? Convergent media, meaning media that includes text video and sound, is ascendant. Also explored: how do you teach news judgment in an environment where context is in some cases non-existent.

Multimedia Journalism Professors on an Island: Resources, Support Lacking at Small Programs
Elia Powers & Jacqueline Soteropoulos Incollingo Vol. 6 no. 1 pp-1.17 Winter 2016
Calls are increasing to "blow up" journalism curriculum to more rapidly embrace the teaching of social media, web media skills. Research study reached out to multimedia journalism university professors to discuss their goals for their students, the challenges they face and the support and resources they receive from their institutions.

A Review and Model of Journalism in an Age of Mobile Media
Oscar Westlund
Explores systemic changes the mass media has gone through to try and embrace digital media and make it more accessible for people using mobile devices. Can be interesting to explore the way content is created and distributed as well as potential concerns about necessary context.

Citizen Journalism vs. Professional Journalism
News, Public Affairs and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation
Edgar Simpson. Lexington Books. August 2014
Discusses many aspects of where the two types of journalism collide including the lanes they fill, the legal responsibilites of traditional journalists and citizen journalists.  Explores the legal protections for journalists as well and the holes in current law that don't cover the digital actor (p141)

Do Mainstream News Outlets have a Moral Obligation to Citizen Journalists?
Glenda Cooper. Nieman Lab. July 15, 2015
Explores what responsibility the mainstream or traditional media has toward supporting or compensating people who are not employed by them but create content that is then used in the mass media.Also whether mass media should actively try to restrain citizen journalists from putting themselves in harm's way.


Ethics & Best Practices
Online Journalism Ethics. Cecilia Friend and Jane Singer. Taylor & Francis. 2007.
Over eight chapters Friend and Singer attempt to summarise how journalism ethics are being changed by the ways new media technologies are being used. They begin by highlighting the culturally-specific and indeed technologically-influenced nature of ethics – how that the emergence of objectivity as an idea, for instance, was derived in part from the development of the telegraph, while new media technologies are reshaping these ethics once again

Media Literacy: Citizen Journalists
Susan Moeller. Report from the Center for International Media Assistance. Oct. 1, 2009
Argues that citizen journalists must be educated about "best practices in standards and ethics." as well as "how to use new technologies". Recognizing that this was created in 2009, it is interesting to juxtapose it with professors' insistence that they can barely keep up with changing technology and certainly it can be argued that the citizen journalists themselves are far more educated on available technologies than the mass media that Moeller argues should be providing instruction.

Creating Ethical Bridges From Journalism to Digital News
Nieman Reports Sept. 17, 2009
Explores ethical issues that arise including authentication of sources, assessing the reliability of information and dealing with conflicts of interest. Granted this is a little old, but I believe many of the concerns are still present.

Legal 
We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age.  Scott Gant. New York. Free Press. 2007
I am concerned this source is a little old to draw relevant conclusions on where the law should fall when it comes to digital journalists. However, it provides a good overview of the questions raised by the unregulated flow of information that can end up informing our mainstream media.

Crowdsourcing
Participatory Journalism Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers
Jane Singer (Book) Hoboken John Wiley & Sons.
Offers insights into how journalists in Western democracies are thinking about, and dealing with, the inclusion of content produced and published by the public. Interviews journalists to discuss how the news-making process.

Crowdsourcing in Investigative Journalism
Johanna Vehkoo (August 2013)
Includes a number of anecdotal examples of successful crowdsourcing from various countries. Points out incidents in Russia, Finland, the U.S. and references the work of NPR's Andy Carvin who used Twitter and crowdsourcing to separate fact from fiction during the Arab Spring.

This article looks at multiple cases of journalists using crowdsourcing to gather data, pointing out the pros and cons. Specifically, it explores the problem of what happens when so much information comes in from the web that the journalist is unable to independently verify it all.

Motivation Factors in Crowdsourced Journalism:Social Impact, Social Change, and Peer Learning
Tanja Aitamurto, Stanford University Vo..9 2015
Talks about the characteristics of crowdsourcing and differentiates it from other types of collaborative effort. Looks specifically at the motivations for the crowd participants, including recognition, enjoyment, acquiring news skills and knowledge, even financial motivations.

Hypertext
Hypertext, narrative and the future of news writing
Holly Cowart UTC Masters Thesis
Looks at how hypertext can be used as a narrative tool, how it plays with different audiences and whether or not hypertext compromises or supports text in which it is used. Also looks at the role it has in trying to support online newspapers and making them more relevant.

Future / Impact on Democracy????

http://library.kean.edu:2048/menu

Looking at Legal Issues for my Thesis

As part of this month's task for working on my thesis, I was trying to explore possible topics for the class I am proposing. One of those topics came to me in a most unexpected way last week. Following the revelations about women that say Donald Trump touched or kissed them inappropriately, I found myself in a conversation with Karen Desoto, an NBC News Analyst and defense attorney. Although not a pundit, she had an interesting take on the reports. In her opinion, they should have never been reported in the first place. Her argument was that the allegations coming out failed to meet what she believed should be the basic standard for reporting, which is whether the allegations would meet the legal standard for being admissible in court. In her opinion, allegations that were 20+ years old, that had not been verified or reported at the time, would never be admitted in court. Therefore, she thinks the New York Times (that is the case we were discussing) should have never reported it. In addition, she made the case that the editors of the paper should have known that the allegations would have a direct impact on the election less than a month off and that that should have played a role in them keeping the reports under wraps unless and until further verification came to light. I was intrigued?  Did she believe the writers at the New York Times failed to uphold their responsibilities as journalists? Yes, she said. Did we, at MSNBC, failed to uphold our responsibilities as journalists by reporting their reports?  Yes again, she believed. And she also felt that even citing the NYT didn't absolve us (a well-worn trick of journalists to pin the responsibility for stuff like this on someone else). Not only did the conversation pique my interest when it came to the legal and ethical responsibilities that come specifically with reporting events that we didn't actually see happen, but it raised questions to me about how those responsibilities should extend to citizen journalists - people blogging or posting things into the public. I asked Karen - do you believe they should have to adhere to the same standards?  Yes, she said - particularly since they have the potential to reach audiences at least as large as some TV networks.  Perhaps there should be some sort of threshold for the size of someone's online reach before opening the floodgates to potential libel litigation, but even those thresholds would be difficult to pin down. What if someone reports something when they have just a handful of followers, then the story picks up traction and they go over the arbitrary threshold set forth in our argument. Can they be sued or not? Essentially what we are asking here is: what are the standards for fact-checking and verification before its fair to report something about someone?  And once the "story" is in cyberspace, do we (either as journalists or citizen journalists or just citizens) take on legal or ethical responsibilities for the factual content of that story simply by retweeting it, or adding it to our blog?  Should we?  And should people who are putting original content online meet some sort of standard for their own content?  And if so, how should it be enforced? I think the legal/ethical questions about what Colbert used to call "truthiness" would be a key part of my thesis and an important topic that can be explored in my future class.

Thesis Progress Oct. 13 - Working on an Intro & looking at research

I'm exploring a couple of ideas for the start of my thesis.  One is to lay out kind of a historical sketch of how journalism and media have co-existed and how this is a different age than any other that came before.

Here's an idea....
Journalism in its traditional form had several roles:  it spoke truth to power, helping unmask corruption and fight for the rights of the common man and it helped bring news from disparate parts of the country and the world into the homes of average people to help them better understand the world around them and the events that would affect their lives. But the medium has always been important. It is clear that the capabilities of the medium play a critical role in how journalism has evolved. Newspapers provided lots of information, but was forced to keep up with the news cycle. Magazines could afford to be even slower (weekly or monthly) because their information and reporting was so much more in-depth. Radio was faster than newspapers but television was even faster than that and had pictures. Moving images were critical and it was obvious early on that the images themselves could strike a deeper chord with the public and reach a wider pool of them. It also sparked a renewed sense of journalistic mission - whereas the newspapers of the 1800's and 1900's fought for the end of slavery as well as women's and worker's rights, television had a key role in sparking the civil rights movement and bringing people the truth of what was happening in Vietnam. Context, in other words understanding what was happening, was in some ways secondary to the impact the pictures had all by themselves. The rise of the internet and digital media has done a few things: even before social media, the internet itself provided so many sources for news that the "context" of a piece of information could be manipulated, even subtly so, depending on where you got your news. The images themselves were still powerful enough to tell a story, but there was less weight given to understanding. Social/digital media has now allowed it so that the visual component of a piece of information may be all there is and the context may be zero. And disturbingly, the source of that information may be completely unknown to the consumer. The consumer is reliant almost completely on the provider's desire to display something accurately and with context in order for the consumer to correctly understand it. More traditional media had previously been a relied about source to at least check the boxes for showing something in an accurate light, but that notion has been so widely disputed that whatever context is provided by traditional media can =also= be dismissed as being unreliable. So where does that leave us? With sources that are unreliable and context that is unreliable.  Because of this, there is much more responsibility put upon news consumers than ever before: to seek out as many disparate news sources as possible, to try to reconcile their information to come up with what you believe to be a common truth and to use common sense to try and cut through white noise and spin.  Social/digital media has also added responsibility to those on the news creation side - journalists have to work harder to make transparent and even-handed and representative of all sides of a story. But those responsibilities now pass down to social media users who themselves have become part of a vanguard of new citizen journalists. They too, bear responsibility for not misrepresenting the images and information they provide, as to allow social and digital media to still function as some form of journalism....

As supporting text for this:
From an historical perspective, whenever a new medium reaches critical mass it threatens to, and does, displace existing media to some degree.   While specific types and segments have and will continue to be negatively affected by new media, as a whole, and over a lengthy period, old media have found ways to survive in the presence of new media.... new media can certainly displace existing media (as with television and the general interest magazines), but it can also have a complementary effect as well (computers, for example). 

This underscores the need for journalistic pedagogy to incorporate new digital/social media into lessons.  In fact, I would argue that an understanding of journalism needs to be made more widely available to students beyond our traditional sphere of education.   So-called traditional journalists are no longer the only ones contributing in the public sphere, and young people of all stripes have a responsibility (as discussed above) to understand the responsibilities they carry with them as civilian journalists.

(Using Google Scholar for my research)

This is discussed in this journal entry in which it discusses the need to rethink our traditional audience, arguing for a more "convergent" approach that takes into account the need to teach news judgment while still taking changing behaviors into account (including the fact that fewer consumers read or are interested in reading about news - they just want to see it). Convergent journalism is defined (by the Univ. of Missouri) as converging two or more mediums to create a stronger story. The challenge is to take into account citizen journalists who want to create, respond and interact with media. Those students need to understand the media options, storytelling, reporting, editing and managing information.  (My take on this is...) Those who want to be "serious journalists" have to also see this new group as resources.. resources to be culled, taught and when possible, used to help other news consumers have a broader understanding of the news. That doesn't mean co-opting these citizen journalists, it means working with them and not treating them as second-class journalists.

One question: where does writing fit in?  Is it still important to be a good writer?  Or do you just need to be a good communicator in some medium?
Longtime journalist William Zinsser says it's still important - even if it's just for a blog.
(The role of writing could be a very interesting part of this).

 

   

Thesis Progress (10/7)

I apologize for being a little late on this post. My research over the past week focused on pedagogy, trying to determine the best way to teach students about the new brand of journalism that I'm looking into,  The first thing we need to understand is more about the students we are focusing on.  We are focused on the younger audiences, both as creators and consumers of news. A symposium at Teaching Journalism and Mass Communication in 2011 described these people as "convergent" thinkers - interested in news, even if it's only a scrap here or there, looking for visual and audio components as well and not necessarily interested in the longer, in-depth read that their parents and grandparents like. They point out that the audiences are so still emerging and that it's difficult to draw conclusions as of yet, but there are some new attempts at teaching with the idea of the "convergent" audience in mind. One possible approach allows the students to guide learning, instead of the teachers who, frankly, may struggle more to be in front of trends. We can allow students to make discoveries through "self-guided experimentation and innovation with multiplatform storytelling, sharing discoveries with each other on digital platforms." This is interesting but it does little to enforce any hard and fast guidelines,,,, unless we determine that the old guidelines no longer apply. When I looked into current curriculum at some of the top universities, I found that much of it focused on what I considered traditional journalistic lessons - fact-gathering, reporting, interviewing, media analysis, etc, Digital media seemed to be only a sidebar in the classes, and not all of them contained a digital component, This seems to be like it ignores the emerging trends. I found another article that shared this view, in which the author argued that digital literacy should be the foundation of journalistic study, with lessons about writing, reporting and editing wrapped around the digital course. Taking this one step further, I looked into ideas for bringing a deeper understanding of social media into journalism education, A study by Stephanie Bor looks more deeply at this question, laying out suggestions for pedagogy while arguing that current journalism educators have been hesitant to embrace the new technology. My initial investigations seem to bear this out, This study is one I plan to dig into more deeply. To underscore the need to look at social media and its role in how people consume the news, we can see in the latest Pew Study of Journalistic trends that 38% of people say they get their news from digital sources, while another 18% get it from social media. Together, they nearly match the 57% of people that get their news from traditional television. This information can help provide a foundation for my thesis in that it can demonstrate why a deeper study is needed into pedagogies for teachers who want to understand how to reach these social media and digital audiences, particularly when it comes to getting them their news, This is just the start of my look at pedagogies, but already I have found several sources worthy of deeper study as I try to get an idea of how I would like to pursue my own thesis.

Thesis Progress Post 1 (9/29)

My task for this week was to begin thinking about how to frame the subject of 21st century journalism with an eye towards possibly formulating a new language and thinking about different themes I could use for classes in the college course I'm putting together.  Some of my initial thoughts are as follows: as a professional, i am worried that the critical thinking and judgment used in putting together the old school news is lost when citizen journalists diisseminate news - in fact, it is in many ways fundamentally different from old school news. the context is often lost - old school news attempts to give you a fleshed out snapshot of what occured - what, when, where, why, how - relying on added content - spoken or otherwise to provide context.  CJ is often provided without context - and is provided with haste as foremost concern - the desire to provide people with a realtime experience being the top priority (it reflects out current culture where much of what we do is predicated on fast content or an experience can be provided) i will say that i believe the quality of the content still matters - the way something is shot, the esthetic, but it is less of a concern than the immediacy to those trying to get it out to the masses.  that said, as this morning's video of the train crash in Hoboken proves, often times the pictures themselves tell a good portion of the story.  I thought also about the fact that many old-school journalists have to consider the risk of putting out bad or misleading information.  Their jobs, livlihoods and reputations are at stake.  But mass narrators (a term im playing with as a description of citizen journalists on digital media) don't have the same kinds of concerns.  They often have anonymity and face no consequences if the information they put out is false or misleading.  Because of that, there is concern that their personal agendas are what is driving their decision-making, as opposed to the good of the masses they are trying to communicate with.  I believe an example of that is the Arab Spring when people used social media to spur protests and then others used social media to instill doubt about the rebel leaders, spread dissention and ultimately help put the military in power. 

Quote from the guardian

"(what we are witnessing is) changing the landscape of documentary filmmaking. This has been made possible by the technology they use, the distribution platforms that are now available and the passion of ordinary men and women to tell the kinds of extraordinary stories that were once the domain of professional documentary makers.

Factual filmmaking has in some senses become hostage to these new, "immediate" technologies. But many working in the genre praise the developments for adding a richer dimension to current affairs and factual documentaries and everyone seems to agree that the genre will never be the same again."

So in terms of language, we are looking at two different things:

traditional journalism - key is context

What if i called citizen journalism a kind of synchronicitous narration or synchro-narration???   although it can be argued that there is a causal link - the event causes the narration...so maybe this doesnt work) Synchronicity is the occurrence of two or more events that appear to be meaningfully related but not causally related.  Narration is telling a story as it happens. So this definition is meant to reflect the telling of a story while that story is going on, with the two events being related although not casually (meaning one does not cause the other to occur)

Perhaps "mass narrative" -  A narrative or story is any report of connected events, actual or imaginary, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, or still or moving images.

A mass narrative (in my thinking) would be characterized by the characterization of what would typically be thought of as a news or current event but presented through the lens of social or mass digital media and not through the more narrow, filtered lens of the traditional media. A mass narrative can be the cause or the effect of current events - sometimes playing both sides of the same story (Black Lives Matter, flash mobs, etc)

We should be careful to point out that these mass narratives are not always organic and can be hijacked by corporate or political power structures (i.e. Obama email lists / social media outreach ahead of the 2008 election).  This raises the question of how, without traditional power brokers, the phenomenon of the mass narrative can remain an entity that can retain at least the quality of relative independence (the web allowing everyone to express themselves equally).

That said, digital media has its own way of policing itself and prevents certain themes or memes of grabbing hold. For instance. public shaming is a form of self-policing (that is also at risk of being grabbed by power brokers - i think of the way people were shamed who used water on their california lawns while the rest of the state was under a drought emergency a few years back).  But other people who use certain types of language that is considered hateful or prejudice can be "shamed" right out of the public sphere - stores that wouldn't serve cakes to gay wedding couples for example were publicly shamed - a store that used mattresses in the shape of the twin towers to mark 9/11 was so publicly shamed that it had to close its doors.  This wasnt just an example of mass narration - there was no story really until the masses made it into one.  The event wasn't purely manufactured, but the media buzz surrounding it was generated purely online without the help of the mainstream or traditional media (can we call it "manufactured media?")

In some ways, mass narration and citizen journalism has its roots in what they called "stringers" - funny that now they are saying news organizations are employing these kinds of people for the first time.  Not true.  People have been listening to police scanners, running to fires with the cameras, taking pictures and selling them to newspapers and tv stations for decades.

(here is a story from nypost that makes it sound otherwise)

But technology has given us far more immediate access to imagery of events as they happen.  Everyone has a camera. Here are examples of civilians taking famous news pics (janis krum http://twitpic.com/135xa).  Even back in the 70's, it was a student photographer John Filo who captured the picture of the girl standing over the body of a student shot at Kent State.

Next up, I'm going to look more closely at university journalism programs

College factual rates journalism colleges this way:

  #1 Emerson College. Boston, Massachusetts. ...

  #2 The University of Texas at Austin. Austin, Texas. ...

  #3 Northwestern University. Evanston, Illinois. ...

  #4 New York University. ...

  #5 University of Southern California

Emerson has courses that touch on the growing field of digital media and its impact on journalism but its as much about getting the students to participate in that world than it is about understanding its impact. JR103 Digital Journalism - "Examines modern media....best web practices...students learn how to use videography, audio to tell stories."  JR220 Interactive News - "students analyze best practices of online news publications and write their own blogs...(also) design a multimedia website."  JR485 includes a topic on blogging, conceiving and writing blogs along with legal and ethical issues.  But all of this seems to be a little behind the times.  I find it hard to believe college students don't know how to blog or maintain a digital/online presence and personality.  My sense is that these courses would need to be advanced to the point where you are taking into account the tools that students already know how to use and structure it to use =those= tools in any journalistic exercises. Also, ethical and legal issues are mention in looking at blogging, but what about other digital media elements? And there seems to be no indication that any of these courses are rethinking journalism itself - just talking about digital media as an element of the medium as opposed to reconsidering how digital media is transforming the way we think about, create and consume the news.

Interesting course at the University of Texas titled Social Media Journalism

But it sounds like they are still treating social media as an aspect, almost a featury element of a newsroom (it says "Students will use various channels to become highly skilled, engaged social media journalists who could step into any social media role in a newsroom).  But it does mention that students will "learn how to cover breaking news using social media and crowdsourcing" which could be informative for this thesis....

Also a fascinating Univ. of Texas story - Explanatory Journalism: Storytelling in a Digital Age. It says it does not explore new digital tools but tries to make best use of "our collective toolkit" to use the best tools to tell stories. A lot of it is about reporting, although they include one class late in the semester  titled "Virtual Reality: The "New New" Thing and mentions that The School of Journalism is working with Computer Science and the Washington Post to develop cutting-edge storytelling using virtual reality. Wow.  I haven't heard of that at all.  Something interesting to look into.

That's all for now.

Please forgive the choppy way this is written.  If I need to do a better job of smoothing it out, please let me know.  This is just the way I think :)