Public journalism redux: Post-academia, Jay Rosen returns to where he started

Jay Rosen has been one of the major thinkers in journalism since the 1990s. Younger followers may think of him mainly as a media critic, and there’s no doubting his influence in that field. Through his blog, PressThink, and his social media presence (especially back in Twitter’s heyday), Rosen showed an uncanny ability to frame issues in a way that made a lot of us think about what we were doing.

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The “production of innocence” was his phrase for “a public showing by professional journalists that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of — and here we enter the realm of dread — political bias.”

“Not the odds, but the stakes” was Rosen’s attempt to move news organizations away from covering politics as a poll-driven sporting event and more on its actual consequences. “The stakes, of course, mean the stakes for American democracy,” Rosen explained. “The stakes are what might happen as a result of the election.”

But alongside Rosen’s media criticism was an earlier, arguably more important mission — an effort to find ways to involve members of the public more directly in journalism through his work on public journalism (sometimes called civic journalism) in the ’90s and, later, through Assignment Zero, described by the Citizendium as “an experiment in crowd-sourced journalism, allowing collaboration between amateur and professional journalists to collectively produce a piece of work that describes correlations between crowd-sourced techniques and a popular movement.” (The phrase “crowdsourcing” was coined by my Northeastern colleague Jeff Howe.)

Now Rosen is returning to those roots. After retiring as a journalism professor at New York University last June, he has taken a post as president of News Creator Corps, a new organization that will work with content creators — the sort of folks we called citizen journalists 20 years ago — to help them adopt some of the tools of journalism without giving up their independence. As he observes, creators have managed to build trust even as the public’s trust in traditional news organizations declines. He writes:

[S]uppose we offer to teach the basics to those in the creator class who might be interested. By “basics” we mean anything that makes them a more reliable and effective provider of news and information. Could be cultivating sources. Checking facts. Conducting interviews. Reaching more people in your community or content niche. What to know if you’re expanding to a platform new to you.

The point would not be to tilt more students toward the journalism schools; instead we try to meet creators where they are. Find out what they want to know, mix in what they need to know, and point the way to better practices, especially in sharing accurate and trustworthy information. Again: this would not be about minting new members for the journalism profession. We have a lot of programs like that.

He adds: “Are there partnerships to be had between newsrooms and creators? Yes, there are partnerships to be had. Can the creator class replace the profession? I say no, it cannot, and should not. But there’s an ideal mix between the two that has yet to be found.”

It will be interesting to see how News Creator Corps intersects with the hyperlocal journalism community. Most of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I wrote about in “What Works in Community News” were founded by professional journalists who had become disillusioned with the endless cuts being imposed by corporate newspaper owners.

But not all. The Bedford Citizen, in Boston’s western suburbs, was started by volunteers with little experience in journalism and only later added paid staff. And there are many outlets serving their communities that are essentially one-person operations; the proprietors are trying to learn the basics of journalism on the go.

So best of luck to Jay, who has long been a professional friend as well as someone who has helped inform the way I think about journalism and its role in a democracy.