You’ve started to answer this, but let me bore in on it a little more specifically. What role might citizen media play in relation to mainstream media in enhancing public life? You seem to be saying there’s maybe a small role there but we maybe are valorizing citizen media a little too much as to what’s possible?
One of the problems is that there is a tendency at times to make a virtue out of necessity – to say that because newspapers are scaling back or even disappearing that citizen journalism can or should take their place or play that role. I want to stress that people like Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor do not say that. But there are people who are less connected with journalism who have somewhat suggested that a lot of what was important and necessary – a lot of what people actually want to read that was being supplied by the local newspapers – can be supplied by various bloggers and citizen contributors at the local level. I think that’s just not the case. So I think that public life will definitely suffer. There may be more formal transparency, but the problem is that formal transparency and reporting are not the same thing. I think that formal transparency without reporting is not strong enough to sustain a democratic public life. It’s necessary but it’s not sufficient.
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