What has gone into that collaboration? Many things. But the essential one was this: involvement of citizens as journalists. As the Times-Picayune writes in its Pulitzer contest entry form: “Our citizen reporters were as essential to this coverage as our staff, and more essential than the standard human sources we have always relied on to tell us what is happening, and why. The citizen journalists, responding to our invitations and consistent guidance throughout the process, did enormous amounts of original reporting. They examined local, state and federal records, and documented what they’d found. They conducted interviews. They told us, and the rest of the world via blogs and online forums, their personal stories. We shared preliminary findings with them, and they responded with a flood of corrections, clarifications, data and new topics to pursue.”

The entry continues, “We were, of course, responsible for what we printed, so we applied journalistic principles and practices to this project. We explained to our citizen journalists that they were responsible for their words, that the laws of defamation applied to them as they do to us. We verified identities. We did extra fact checking when potential legal questions might have arisen.

“With few exceptions, we found the citizen journalists’ work to be of exceptionally high quality. They cared, because this story was in the end about their own lives as citizens of this region and this nation. In the end, we could not have done this work without them.”

Oh, and by the way, one more report from the future. The voters who read these stories got mad. When the 2008 elections came around, they got revenge. And in a region of the country where good and honest government has frequently been an oxymoron, things began to change.

OK, nice story. I’m frequently accused of naïveté. I may even be nuts. But I’m definitely an optimist.

I don’t know if something like this will occur as soon as I’d like. But I do know that something like this scenario is coming.

It’s coming because of the way media are evolving. If we’re both smart and lucky, the media will be an ecosystem that is vastly richer and more diverse than we have today. It will become a multi-directional conversation.

The grassroots activities that I find so inspiring are happening not just in journalism, but all across society.

In business, for example, the web and open source concepts are transforming not just software development but the relationship companies have with their customers and other constituencies. In the arts, the democratization of once-unaffordable tools of production and distribution are unleashing creativity on a fantastic scale. In war zones, smart leaders are pushing information and much of the decision-making out to the edges and away from central commands. They’re learning, often the hard way, that agility can outfox brute force.

I could talk for days about the potential for aggregating the stand-alone folks—bloggers, podcasters and the like—into a coherent news medium. Smart people are working on this right now, and making progress.

But I don’t want the Big Media to disappear. The work they do is too important. It’s essential for professional journalists to adapt to what’s happening. They can bring valuable principles and practices to this table. And they can serve society’s interests—and their own—in the process.

Bringing more voices into the conversation strikes me as an obviously good idea from a journalistic point of view. The long-range financial salvation of what some people sneeringly call the MSM, or mainstream media, may depend—at least in part—on a collaboration with what I like to call the “former audience.”

We all know that in some ways journalism has never been better. In print and broadcast and on the web, the best people in our craft are doing brilliant work.
But if we agree that democracy requires an informed citizenry, we should be furious at the wider failings of journalism in recent years. I’m glad that Big Media people seem to have located their spines in the coverage of the Katrina disaster.

As Bill Moyers said recently, “The quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inseparable.”

We all know the reasons for the quality problems. Financial pressures from Wall Street. A short public attention span. Competitive instincts that go wrong. I’ll add one: For the past century, we in mass media have been giving lectures when we should have been having conversations.

The collision of journalism and technology will enable the conversation. We can thank—or curse, depending on our view of these shifts—the Internet’s increasing reach and the availability of low-cost and easy-to-use communications tools.

All three of journalism’s major constituencies are feeling the impact.

The most important is the former audience—the people who until recently were our readers, listeners, viewers. They don’t have to be satisfied with a single source, and they’re learning how to use their newfound choices. More important for today’s topic, the former audience can now become part of the journalism process, whether by communicating with professional journalists or, if they wish, by producing their own content with a variety of techniques.

Keep in mind that this is not only about weblogs. Blogs are getting most of the attention today, but they are only part of what is happening. Think of blogs as a proxy for an explosion of citizen-media tools, including audio podcasts, wikis, interactive presentations such as user-annotated web maps and increasingly sophisticated amateur videos.

This is more about people than gadgets. Citizen journalism is made possible by what’s new. It will be made excellent because of what people do with it.

The second major constituency of journalism fits into a category we call newsmakers, the people and institutions that journalists cover. Something new is being done to them. Where they once dealt with a finite number of media observers, now they must deal with bloggers, podcasters, online chat rooms and a variety of other ways in which people are talking among themselves.

At the same time, newsmakers have powerful new ways to deliver their own messages. They can, and should, use these tools to have conversations with their own customers and others.

The third constituency of journalism is, of course, the professional journalists. We have a lot to learn. If we accept the idea that we are moving toward a more conversational system, then we must remember that the first rule in having a conversation is to listen. We don’t listen very well.

When I went to Silicon Valley to write about technology, I learned quickly a fact of life that has been at the heart of my grassroots journalism notions ever since. It was simple: my readers—many of whom were in the technology business—knew more than I did. They told me things I did not know. They made my work better.

I believe this concept is true for all journalists. No matter which topic you are writing about, your collected readers know more than you about the subject.

The value in this should be clear to all of us. Our audience can help us understand our subjects better. The readers can give us facts we did not know. They can add nuance. They can ask follow-up questions. And, of course, they can tell us when we are wrong, or at least raise vital questions, as CBS News and its “60 Minutes” team found out so dramatically last year.

We are fond of holding everyone else to account. More scrutiny of our own methods and motives is not a bad idea. I’m glad to see that CBS News now has a resident blogger whose job, in part, is to explain what’s happening behind the scenes.

But the biggest jump for journalists is not just opening up, or creating blogs or letting people comment on our sites.

No, the crucial leap, I believe, will be helping our audience become involved in the process much more directly.

The democratization of information is radical. In technology we call it “peer to peer”—a break from the top-down model of the past.

If we journalists bring more average citizens into the process at any level—commenting, reporting, taking pictures, you name it—we are turning them into participants.

We can start with simple ideas, like linking to the best local blogs covering issues we don’t have enough staff to cover. Or give readers their own blogs to cover things we don’t bother with.

The web is an increasingly versatile platform. Some Canadian papers are about to set up interactive maps that readers will annotate with all kinds of useful local information. How about a map showing potholes, street by street, annotated with readers’ photos? If news organizations don’t do these things, don’t worry. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft will.

At the very least, with more reader action, people become engaged with the news, which is an improvement all by itself. When enough of them do it with our assistance and recognition, and with the benefit of the very real resources a local media organization can bring to bear, they can be part of a virtual town square.

When you give power to what has been a passive audience, and they start using it, you start people on the road toward being even better citizens.

Democracy is not a passive activity, not if you want an outcome that preserves justice and liberty and honest government. It takes work. Instead of lecturing our audiences, let’s ask for their help—and offer our own.

— Dan Gillmor ’87 is the founder of Grassroots Media, Inc.

FALL 2005 MAIN PAGE