Role playing

June 29, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis

Tom Rosenstiel started off a panel on “finding a new definition of journalism” with a wonderful litany of roles the professionals can play. He began by saying that he — and we — hope we are past the argument about who is a journalist — everyone can do journalism — and that the definition of news itself has exploded. In this world without gatekeepers, then, professionals can find important roles, including:
* authenticating information
* making sense of information
* uncovering information
* monitoring the debate and making sure many views are heard
* convening people
* enabling.

I like that. My list:
* moderator
* enabler
* educator.

  • CrudeBoy

    Jeff, Back in my trade journalism days, I had a Managing Editor that decided I wasn’t a journalist since I did not have a journalism degree. (I had worked for a wire service for three years at that point.) So she demanded I take a course. I took an advanced journalism workshop at NYU, and ended up helping teach the class, since the teacher, an editor herself, was impressed that I worked for a wire service.

    The whole thing was a waste of time.

  • http://www.tyndallreport.com Andrew Tyndall

    Can’t we lighten up a little here? This sounds more like broccoli than reporting. What about writing skills? Professionals should be much better than amateurs at making news interesting, snappy, fun to read or watch or listen to, dynamic, moving and so on. Let’s not imagine that composing a story is a universal innate skill. It requires practice and experience and expertise as well as native abilities. Good storytellers deserve to be paid as professionals.

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  • http://conservatism.crispynews.com/ ashok

    I like your list, but what is the standard for “education?” Is it only working with that which consitutes the present and hopefully the future?

    And if education is necessarily some sort of engagement with the past, what ought to be demanded of journalists in terms of their own education….

  • http://www.buzzmachine.com Jeff Jarvis

    Andrew: Sometimes, it won’t be about writing but packaging, linking, remixing.

  • http://www.mythusmageopines.com Alan Kellogg

    In journalism today the goal is more like, kill things and take their stuff.

  • Ed Rusch

    Remixing is not a skill. And there are gatekeepers galore. A remixer like yourself has a paltry audience (thanks for letting us all see your site stats, Jeff); a gatekeeper like a large daily has an audience literally millions of times larger than yours.

    That’s why user-generated content is already the buzzword of yesterday and a doomed concept. The vast majority of people don’t give a crap about your remix.

  • http://conservatism.crispynews.com/ ashok

    Mr. Rusch, that’s too vicious to be accurate. If there’s such a thing as a good remix or bad remix, then there’s probably some element of skill involved.

    The issue of people not caring about user-generated content is a separate question. A lot of the Internet, for me, is pearls before swine. When I first came online, I was just blown away – still am blown away – by a place where I can get every poem by Emily Dickinsons and Yeats; see top-notch digitial photography generated by budding artists; read some incredible essays – I remember one by Freeman Dyson in NYRB where he used the analytic/synthetic distinction to argue that science is inexahustible; and showcase my own work, which I take a lot of pride in, but you seem to think is crap merely by being generated by me, a “user.”

    Mr. Jarvis constantly talks about how this Internet thing is empowering. I know I agree with him in sentiment, and that we probably agree on some standards. The issues of disagreement – on what “free speech” is, exactly, and what conditions exactly democracy flourishes best under – are issues reasonable people can disagree on.

    I consider your tone to be inherently unreasonable, and to be the product of an immaturity (“I might be right, so let me be loud and boorish”) that makes me wonder whether freedom is a good thing. Your character is suspect, inasmuch you choose to represent your worst side here, while the rest of us are working to make this place better.

  • SimplyTired

    I consider your tone to be inherently unreasonable, and to be the product of an immaturity (”I might be right, so let me be loud and boorish”) that makes me wonder whether freedom is a good thing. Your character is suspect, inasmuch you choose to represent your worst side here, while the rest of us are working to make this place better.

    Nice going “ashok”…talking about someone’s character and all. If this is how “the rest of” you work, take a walk. You are not welcome here if you resort to personal attacks like this.

    –SimplyTired

  • http://www.mythusmageopines.com Alan Kellogg

    Simply Tired,

    Who died and made you Jeff Jarvis?

  • http://conservatism.crispynews.com/ ashok

    Mr. Kellogg – that same criticism can be levelled at me. And it is true that I engaged in a personal attack.

    I stand by my words.

  • SimplyTired

    Simply Tired,

    Who died and made you Jeff Jarvis?

    No one. Actually, now that I read your comment, I agree with it. Journalism, as it is prominently practised today and I am only a consumer of it, does indeed feel like “kill things and take their stuff,” and not only that, but hound like hyenas before the kill. But then when did it ever feel otherwise, I wonder. Been reading some literature on how press/media was during Civil War and that’s no solace either. Sometimes I wonder if the institution of decent public debate has died after the Federalist papers, but that’s not journalism, just simply makes us wish it were so.

    SimplyTired.

  • SimplyTired

    “ashok” – I am impressed, seriously, by your candor and not resorting to flaming. Class act.

    SimplyTired

  • http://conservatism.crispynews.com/ ashok

    Mr. Kellogg, I can honestly say I don’t understand your thought about the killing things and taking stuff, as it pertains to the media. I guess you mean that the media is power hungry in some way?