What a crock of crap. The IOC says competitors can't be journalists? That's saying they do not have any right to free speech and can speak only through journalists. That's offensive and stupid. But then, that's the IOC. [via
Journalism at eye-level
: When I talk about the news business these days, I find myself constantly returning to the same refrain:
We must bring journalism down to a human level, down from the tower it built to separate itself from the public, down to eye level.
Please allow me to glue together a series of thoughts on the subject:
: I found myself ranting on the topic a few times recently when I was talking with separate groups of smart folks about the branding and image of journalistic endeavors. The topic of names came up and all the obvious ones for news products have been words you want to etch in granite: Tribune, Times, Guardian. That's news the way it used to be or some hoped it would be: behind stone walls, inside the cathedral, separate, cold, above, beyond.
Now we are seeing that if journalism is to survive, let alone prosper, it must speak at a human level and must also listen; it must join in the conversation of the community.
Given that, the names we should consider should be more human, like Pulse, Sinews, Face, Eyes, Ears, Tongues, Hearts, Feet, Guts, Shout, Spit, or, yes, Spleen.
: Now see Jay Rosen's two inspiring posts about whether 9/11 changed journalism -- or rather, whether it changed journalists.
Do we admit we are human and have a human reaction to the event? Do we allow ourselves to root for our side in this war -- which requires recognizing that we are at war and what side we are on? And if we don't -- if we act as if we do not have our own worldviews, as Jay puts it -- doesn't that too often end up perverting our coverage so, in a futile and misguided effort to be objective, we try to be fair to terrorists (did anybody worry after 1933 about being fair to Hitler?)? Just because you have a worldview doesn't mean you have to do nothing but argue for it; it doesn't mean you can't ask tough and uncomfortable questions; it only means that your questions have some context.
This is really about admitting that we are human. As a human being, you must have a reaction to 9/11 and to deny it, to hide it, is to lie to those to whom you are trying to be truthful, your public. To instead be human and admit your reaction and the worldview it reshapes is to give a context to what you say so your public can better judge it. Isn't that more honest? Isn't that thus better journalism?
: Now see a wonderful speech Hodding Carter gave to the AEJMC journalism confab in Toronto two weeks ago. I'll quote at length; he begins by talking about his newspapering days:
We practiced journalism with zeal and, occasionally, foolhardy abandon. We took up the implicit demands – the implicit responsibility inherent in the First Amendment – and let people know our editorial mind when most of them would have happily been spared that opportunity. We covered our region, warts and all.
And we participated in the life and civic causes of our town – Greenville, Mississippi – with avocational fervor. We saw ourselves as citizens as well as journalists. We saw ourselves not simply as a mirror reflecting what was happening in the community, or as its critics, but as indivisible from it, a piece of the community’s fabric....
We practiced civic journalism, public journalism, regularly and routinely, without ever having heard the term. God knows we did so with no anticipation of the intensely vapid and frequently demagogic controversy that was to surround its articulation or of the overt attempt by certain of the journalistic elites to suffocate its resurrection three and more decades later.
For us, the journalist as citizen was not a doctrine or a debating point – it was the whole point of the enterprise....
Grieve over the polls’ mounting evidence of the separation between the people on the one hand and the institutions designed to protect and advance their interests on the other.
Gaze steadily at the decline in the public’s belief that the First Amendment should be taken at face value, embraced as the lifeblood of democracy, respected in practice under the most heated of circumstances.
And then consider the slow but steady erosion in the connection – as measured by readership and viewer ship – between the public on the one hand and print and television media on the other.
All are part and parcel of a mushrooming societal phenomenon, not random unrelated phenomena....
We in journalism and in the academy have been playing the wrong game, the game of separation from our own society.
We complain because “they” don’t read what we write, appreciate what we teach, understand the fundamentals of our trade and our society – but we complain at arms’ length, from on high, from the sidelines....
The journalist is a member of the community, not apart from it. The journalist is a citizen equal to every other citizen. The journalist is human.
: This isn't just about opinions and bias and honest people having honest disagreements about how they view the world and the news. Yes, that's most of it.
But it's also about business. It's about how our audience/market/public views us and what we try to sell them. It's even about how we deliver the news.
I mentioned a few weeks back going to focus groups at which news consumers, casual and fervent, looked at the mirror -- knowing that Journalism was on the other side of it -- and complained in one voice, "Your stories are too long!" For them, our stories are repetitive. They are filled with show-off paragraphs. They waste the readers' time and that is a terrible sin.
If you were having a conversation with someone and realized you were boring them, wouldn't you shut up or at least get to the point? But that's just the problem: News, until now, hasn't been a conversation.
[And, yes, I recognize the irony of making that point in the middle of an unusually long and rambling post. As a wise editor of mine once said to me as I was writing a breaking story on deadline: "Find the nearest period." I'm almost there.]
This is also about how, where, and when we deliver the news. We used to inconvenience the audience because we didn't have much choice: We made you wait until we delivered the paper or put our show on the air. Well, now, we can deliver you the news wherever and however and whenever you want and if we don't do that, aren't we being rather rude? Aren't we still being haughty if we think you will go out of your way to read or hear what we have to say about the news you already know?
Making journalism human is about humility.
: Of course, humility is being thrust upon journalism, like it or not, by the likes of Jayson Blair. Nothing makes it clearer that journalism is not an infallible institution, but rather the product of a bunch of quite fallible humans.
Humility is also thrust upon journalism, of course, by the birth of bloggers: Now mere mortals can do what the high priests of journalism do without the institutions, the capital, the educations, the infrastructure but with the push of a button. Bloggers can question and cajole the institution. They bring it down to size. They even the playing field. They make everybody human.
: Good things come of making all journalism human. It makes all humans journalists.
Last week, as I said here, I went to Flemington, NJ, for a hyperlocal blog MeetUp and almost 30 good neighbors showed up eager to spark and join in the conversation of the community. These good people will share more information than a paperbound newspaper ever could afford to gather and print. But it's also important to note that most of them came there because the newspaper told them about it and the editor of the newspaper was there. Everybody has something to contribute to this conversation.
: Now this all seems obvious and trite because it is. But even so, we in journalism lose sight of this all the time. That is why we come together to have conferences about transparency and about public journalism and why we appoint ombudsmen to listen to the public.
But it's really quite simple: Journalism is about people telling people things they want or need to know. If you remember that, if you see journalism as a conversation at eye-level, then you're less likely to hide behind priestly invocations of objectivity; you're less likely to hide your own opinions and emotions; you're less likely to bore and inconvenience those you're hoping to serve; you're more likely to listen; you're more likely to actually end up knowing what the people you're serving want and need; you're more likely to succeed.
We're only human.
: In Jay Rosen's latest post about 9/11 and journalism, there is this about journalists wearing the 