Tanni Haas: Question 1

You, and other scholars such as Jay Rosen, Tom Warhover and Mark Deuze have mentioned that traditional journalists will need to come to terms with the inevitability of news construction through the online world. One consistent thread in these observations is that the online world encourages dialogue as a vital component of relaying and understanding news. This dialogic aspect is, of course, antithetical to traditional journalistic principles and practices of detached, fact-oriented reporting. How do you see both public journalism and citizen journalism building a bridge that will allow traditional journalists to successfully adjust and contribute to a more dialogic news product?

For public journalism, I think the challenge is to show traditional journalists that it is indeed possible to create a dialogic news product which relies on the participation of a wide spectrum of citizen voices, and that such citizen participation enriches the news product in a variety of ways. I am thinking here in particular of the many race-relations initiatives that public journalism has been involved with over the years. These initiatives have sought the input of people of different racial backgrounds, and the resulting news coverage has clearly shown that there is no “detached” way of reporting on race-relations and no single, authoritative “fact” of race that people can agree upon across racial divides. Indeed, these initiatives clearly show that journalists’ reporting is inherently influenced by their own racial affinities, and that citizens’ views on given race-related issues are refracted through their particular racial identities. For citizen journalism, I think the challenge is to show traditional journalists that the distinction between “news” and “views” (or “facts” and “values”) is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, virtually all citizen journalism initiatives show that citizens’ choice of issues and internal discussion of those issues are grounded in their particular views on given issues.