« The audience awakens to play the media game | Main | What does news mean? »
July 10, 2006
Rhetorica Update
I've been away for about a week. That's why I've posted so little recently. I'll be in Minnesota next week conferring with Doug McGill and Jeremy Iggers regarding our participation in the Media Ethics Colloquium this October. We're wrestling with the question: Who is a journalist? Background here. The upshot so far:
Boiled way down, here's what we decided: Commercial news organizations do not get to decide who counts as a journalist; audiences get to decide who counts. So would-be journalists must create legitimacy among the publics they would serve. And we suggest three ways that may be done outside of a traditional newsroom: 1) be loyal to the audience first, 2) make the invisible visible (i.e. cover those people and topics the so-called mainstream media ignore), and 3) operate with a discipline of verification and as a custodian of facts. Do these things and you may properly call yourself a journalist.
I'll be spending a lot of time this week finishing my initial library data mining and making notes. Next week the three of us will try to hammer out some kind of (very) rough draft. I'll post a few things about this process from Minnesota, including a podcast or two.
Further, I hope to come away from this exercise with some better answers to these questions, at least as the answers intersect the practice of citizen journalism.
In other news, Max Skidmore and I have signed a contract with Cambridge Scholars Press to publish our book "Politics and Language." Work to be completed: secure copyright permissions and write the chapter introductions. Deadline: 31 January 2007. Estimated publication: early fall 2007.
Posted by acline at July 10, 2006 1:55 PM | | Spotlight