Journalism as a conversation

Saw University of Memphis journalism prof Carrie Brown’s tweet about this. I don’t often link to graduate students’ thesis papers, but this is an elegant read: Journalism-as-a-Conversation: A Concept Explication (Word doc), by Doreen Marchionni, a doctoral student at the University of Missouri-Columbia (which is still turning out the bright ones). Excerpt:

Journalism can’t tell the truth because no one can tell the truth. All journalism can do is preside over and within the conversation of our culture: to stimulate it and organize it, to keep it moving, and to leave a record of it so that other conversations –– art, science, religion –– might have something off which they can feed. The public will begin to reawaken when they are addressed as a conversation partner and are encouraged to join the talk rather than sit passively as spectators before a discussion conducted by journalists and experts.
– James Carey, “The Press and Public Discourse” (The Kettering Review, 1992)

Ken Burns’s sweeping documentary of World War II told from ordinary people’s point of view.  Internet video-sharing site YouTube’s entry into televised presidential debates.  Web journals and other blogs covering everything from cooking to car care. In their own way, each reflects a phenomenon peculiar to the early-21st century: stories and conversations elicited from the bottom up, a kind of people’s narrative.  In these foundering days of mainstream American journalism laden with public distrust (Pew, 2002; State of the News Media, 2007), such narrative is no less present but perhaps of greater importance to citizens in a democracy.  It began with a whisper in the public-journalism reform movement of the late-20th century, then roared into the next century with perhaps the most powerful agent of social change since television: the Internet.

Conversation. Collaboration. Interaction. In academic terms, the story of how we got here in journalism, or the explication of the concept of journalism as a conversation, is potentially theory building at its richest. In the absence of such theory, that is the inspiration for this essay.  Though the concept has origins in the founding of American democracy and in the philosophies of Dewey (1927) and Mead (1934), my departure point is the late James Carey’s seminal essay on conversation in The Kettering Review. Published in 1992, it coincided with the rise of public journalism and perhaps helped clarify its mission to bring journalists and ordinary citizens closer together to improve civic engagement.  More remarkable is that the essay fundamentally re-imagines the relationship between journalist and citizen years before the Internet made that not only possible but essential.  It is in keeping with Carey’s own explication of mass communication as cultural exchange (1988) rather than the mechanical transmission of information that prevailed in social sciences for decades. People versus machines. Poetry versus science.  Carey’s (1992) clarion call to journalists to engage ordinary people in a conversation rather than a lecture is as much about the push and pull of ideas in the practice of social science as anything, the individual viewed either as active agent of change or passive subject of scientific scrutiny. The Internet perhaps more than any other innovation clearly bridges these two worlds, its founding a milestone in computer science, its use and diffusion fundamentally democratic. …

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.