CITIZENS’
Jeff Jarvis
buzzmachine.com
The internet is the first medium owned by its audience, the first medium to finally give the audience its equal voice.
Today, history’s simplest and least expensive publishing tools are connected to history’s greatest distribution network, the internet. The result: Everyone can have a printing press and the power that goes with it; anyone can have a broadcast tower and the reach that goes with that. As NYU journalism Prof. Jay Rosen says, the “audience” is a thing of the past, for now readers are writers and writers are readers.
This is beginning to have a transformative impact on journalism and the news business as well as on government, politics, marketing, culture, and the academe. This impact is far from fully realized and has barely been studied.
There is a need to create a Citizens’
Thus, the center serves four constituencies in these ways:
Journalism students
- New publishing tools, such as weblogs, and new multimedia tools are powerful new teaching instruments for journalism students. They allow students to create complete news products and to distribute and evaluate their work quickly and inexpensively. The center will create curricula and exercises to help students use these tools effectively.
- These tools also allow students to showcase their work, to get reaction from audiences far sooner than they could in the past, and to create effective portfolios that will help them find jobs. The center will create showcases with them.
- Even more important, the students will need to create new relationships with their audiences, who are now fellow writers, editors, publishers, and producers. This can be seen as a competitive threat, but it should be seen as a broadening opportunity to discover new sources of information and new perspectives. The center will study, with students, the impact of audience content on established media and will create the means – with, for example, community publishing projects – by which students and citizen journalists can work together to gather more and better information, to seek out new voices, and to better communicate the needs and views of the public.
- The center will help the journalism department – students, faculty, and news organizations – study the radical changes coming in news: the increasing nichefication of outlets and audiences, the explosion of sources of information, the increase in the audience’s influence and power, the ability to cover ever-more-local and ever-more-specialized interests, the increase in opinion in news coverage, and the revolutionary changes in the advertising marketplace that supports news media.
- For the first time in modern memory, journalism students can think and act as entrepreneurs. Until the advent of the internet and citizens’ media, they had only one career path in media: to get jobs at established outlets. Now, they can start their own media properties. With advice, mentoring, and education in business and best practices, the center will encourage and enable students and graduates to create new media properties out of the university.
Citizen journalists
- The center will encourage the growth of this new medium and also its quality through education.
- The center will create online curricula to aid practitioners of citizens’ media in their new craft, teaching them basics of reporting, legal issues for media, and possibly the business of media as well as on the new tools of this trade.
- The center will bring together conferences with these new citizen journalists so they can meet, share best practices, learn, and educate their constituencies – established media, journalism educators, government, and business – on their perspectives.
- The center will put a spotlight on the best of citizens’ media through directories, showcases, and awards.
- The center will endeavor to fund scholarships for citizen-journalist students.
Established media
- The center will help established news media to understand and take advantage of the explosion of citizens’ media to establish a new, two-way relationship with readers and viewers and to bring in new sources of information and new, diverse viewpoints from the community.
- The center will create directories of notable weblogs and other citizens’ media – serving various interests, demographic groups, countries, and languages – as a new and diverse source for reporters working in established media.
- The center will find best practices, publish articles, and hold meetings with media organizations to explore and help implement ways to incorporate interactivity and citizens’ content in their print and online properties, how to put the spotlight on the audience and its interests and needs, and how to gather new information this way. In the process, the center will educate media organizations about the advantages of establishing new, two-way relationships with their audiences.
- It is hoped that this can also help established media organizations find new ways to serve varying constituencies, such as ethnic audiences.
- The center will bring established journalists to conferences with webloggers and other citizen journalists to have them explore the new relationship.
- The center will offer workshops to teach professional journalists how to use the new tools of online publishing and broadcasting.
Other constituencies
- The center will include other constituencies – politicians, government officials, marketers, teachers – in conferences to better understand a new relationship with their constituencies thanks to these new tools.
International
opportunities
There are also tremendous opportunities to use the power of citizens’ media to grow and expand a free press in new and emerging democracies. The center can help encourage this movement in many ways: with help and translation of tools; with outreach to these nations; with scholarships for foreign citizen journalists; with exposure of these citizen journalists and their viewpoints to major media.