Lew Friedland Question 3

Breaking there is a good segue into the question that Joyce Nip has, which is whether traditional news operations should strive to have as a goal this notion of involving citizens in deliberation. And in addition to asking whether they should they have that as a goal – building off what you were just saying – can they have that as a goal?

There really are two or even three parts to the answer. First of all, should newspapers strive to involve citizens, more generally, and I think the answer to that fairly obviously is: yes, by any means necessary and through every medium possible. And we are seeing that. My colleague Sue Robinson and a number of other folks write about the opening up of the newspaper, changes in journalistic authority, the use of blogs by journalists and certainly the incorporation of various forms of citizen journalism into local Internet versions of newspapers. Clearly there is a rise in citizen involvement and to my mind that’s a good thing, an unabashed good.

The second question is: is that deliberation? And I think that’s a much more difficult question that many people who are involved in advocating for citizen journalism haven’t really answered very well or haven’t thought through as well as perhaps they might have.
The third part of the question concerns deliberation itself and whether that is possible and desirable. In the best of circumstances there was some very deep and rich deliberation conducted by and sponsored by civic and public journalists, particularly for example the Norfolk Virginian Pilot’s efforts that were just very rich and very well prepared. The (Wichita) Eagle did that, too, extremely well, in the beginning. There were other papers obviously that did that quite well; I don’t want to suggest that only those papers [Norfolk and Wichita] did this, but they were particularly good at it.

So there was deliberation conducted by these papers. It required a huge amount of work, a lot of time, and a lot of preparation. There were very skilled public life editors or heads of public life teams that went out and organized them. They often involved various kinds of citizen surveys or focus groups. There was a lot of time and effort and of course money, which pays for time and effort, put into them. I don’t see that happening again in almost any local news organization or newspaper that I can think of any time soon. The Philadelphia Inquirer, which just declared bankruptcy, did some experiments under Chris Satullo in urban planning several years ago. So, it has happened in the period since I wrote that piece. But it’s been very rare, it’s been fairly expensive, it’s usually involved some kind of broader civic partnership along with the newspaper – somebody has to organize and convene it and that’s a whole other set of questions. Right now newspapers are barely equipped to put out the daily news much less organize and convene public deliberations. So, I’m not very sanguine about what I would call genuine deliberation continuing through the auspices of local newspapers. I just don’t think that the personnel in terms of the skill or the time and money is there to do it.

Some people might argue that online citizen journalism is a substitute for deliberation – essentially that the wisdom of crowds that emerges in the context of an ongoing discussion is one possible and a sufficient substitute for that kind of intensive deliberative local experiment. I myself don’t think that it is for a variety of reasons, known to most people who have observed the overall quality of discussion that goes on in most responses to local online newspapers. The quality of that discussion, while sometimes interesting and often lively, is rarely deliberative. I don’t see that kind of deliberation happening anywhere. Again, some advocates of a kind of wisdom-of-crowds approach might say: well, it need not happen because it’s more distributed over space and time, there are more open voices, we don’t need to have that same intensive discussion like we used to. Well, either way I don’t think that it is occurring and I’m not sanguine about it occurring.

Having said that, do I think it should and could occur? Yes, I do. There are now a number of new ways of doing online deliberation that are truly deliberative – experiments that have been conducted by America Speaks and others in using online deliberative modalities that are pretty rich and quite good. But they involve, like I think all real deliberation does, some form of moderated discussion. They don’t do away with the need for an organizer, they don’t do away with the need for a moderator. It’s just that they take place online rather than face-to-face, and that still requires a convener and the money to do that convening. So while I think that the capacity for the kind of deliberation that was done in the heyday of public journalism is there, I think that the will and the resources to do it are not.