PressThink: The People Formerly Known as the Audience

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

That's what I call them. Recently I received this statement.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.

Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.

Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.

You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.

A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

The “former audience” is Dan Gillmor’s term for us. (He’s one of our discoverers and champions.) It refers to the owners and operators of tools that were one exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention.

Jeff Jarvis, a former media executive, has written a law about us. “Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will.”

Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.

Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.

But we’re not on your clock any more. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.”

We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun.

Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for us: The Active Audience (“who doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share.”)

Another of your big shots, Rupert Murdoch, told American newspaper editors about us: “They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”

Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, said it back in 1994: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.”

Online, we tend to form user communities around our favorite spaces. Tom Glocer, head of your Reuters, recognized it: “If you want to attract a community around you, you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work.”

We think you’re getting the idea, media people. If not from us, then from your own kind describing the same shifts.

The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs,” as in: “There is always a new challenge coming along for the eyeballs of our customers.” (John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners in the U.S.)

Or: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen.” (Ann Kirschner, vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League.)

Fithian, Kirschner and company should know that such fantastic delusions (“we own the eyeballs…”) were the historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others. New media is undoing all that, which makes us smile.

You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links

Check this out: The People formerly known as The Congregation (March 28, 2007.) Revises and extends my remarks into the situation with organized religion today…

We are The People formerly known as The Congregation. We have not stopped loving the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Nor do we avoid “the assembling of the saints.” We just don’t assemble under your supposed leadership. We meet in coffee shops, around dinner tables, in the parks and on the streets.

Caused quite a stir online too.

I have been using the phrase, the people formerly known as the audience, for a while. But I had never tried to define it. This post came out of reflections after BloggerCon IV (June 23-24, “empowering the users”) and in anticipation of the Media Giraffe conference (June 28-July 1, “Sharing News & Information in a Connected World”) but also in the course of writing Web Users Open the Gates (Washingtonpost.com, June 19).

Google Blog Search for the phrase “people formerly known as the audience.” Regular ‘ol Google Search for the phrase.

“Guys, citizen’s media isn’t fairy dust that you can sprinkle on an existing program and make it magically interactive, bloggy and web 2.0 compliant.” Ethan Zuckerman is talking to American Public Media’s “Marketplace” on how not to approach the former audience:

So let’s get this straight - Marketplace isn’t able to answer email from listeners, even when those listeners are offering to help them work on getting a former contributor out of prison. But Marketplace is interested in having me fill out a 19-field form so they can contact me via email and, if neccesary, call me for a quick soundbyte on an upcoming story.

Dave Winer gets lyrical at Scripting News (July 1):

We live in the age that Emerson predicted, self-reliance. Make your own music and your own products. Everyone gets to be creative. The brains are in what we used to call the audience. No more looking up to the ivory tower for all fulfillment. Thank god we don’t all have to be as beautiful as Farah Fawcett and Christopher Reeve. Everyone gets to sing. Users and developers party together.

Amy Gahran at Poynter about TPFKATA: “Seriously: News pros should be watching and joining this conversation.” Amy also points to a BlogPulse tool for tracking the ripples outward from this post.

Ripple: At the Associated Press Managing Editors website, Mark Briggs of the (Tacoma, WA) News Tribune says to fellow editors:

You need to read the post – and the comments – to understand what is happening “out there.” The audience is off the sidelines and in the game and is going to play. It’s up to you to play with it in a way that benefits everyone.

They used to be our most loyal customers. Fine Young Journalist, commenting on this study by a Harvard master’s student (“Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News”) says about the users of Digg.com, Slashdot.org and other wisdom-of-the-crowd sites… “These aren’t just the people formerly known as the audience, they’re the people formerly known as our audience.”

Should you be in the immediate vicinity, I will be performing this post on Nantucket Island, July 26 at Nantucket Antheneum (8:00-9:30 pm, Great Hall) as part of the Geschke Lecture Series. If you are a blogger and want to attend, e-mail me.

Doc Searls is right that power “shifting,” while crudely accurate, is less than apt for my case. Power is expanding and dispersing because broader participation makes for a “bigger” press. Doc:

The expansion of authorship from few to many is a postive-sum development. So is the expansion of authority and influence that naturally grows in a market constantly enlarged by broader participation, and not merely by a growing choice of “content.”

There are lots of ways for “old” media to adapt to the new system. “Unfortunately, few or none of them are in the toolboxes of the old system.” Read his response to TPFKATA. And Doc returns to the subject here.

Ripples… Stowe Boyd: “Once power migrates to the edge, the edglings are unlikely to give it back.”

Jeremie at Temporally Relevant likes the term: “To be an edgling is to share and participate with your peers through open technology.”

Stowe Boyd’s follow-up post, Edglings: A Well-Ordered Humanism and The Future Of Everything (July 11).

Personally, I favor the term Edgling because I want to move away from media metaphors, and use economic or sociological ones. This is not about who is “producing content” and who is “consuming” it: which is the basic paradigm of media thinking. Instead, it is about control moving from the central, large, mass-market organizations — which includes media companies, but also other large organizations, like government, religious organizations, and so on — out to the individuals — we, the people — at the edge.
As power moves from the center to the edge the “Centroids” — those that hold with the centralized power of an industrial era — will scream about all the negatives that they perceive in the out-of-control future that threatens the basis of their worldview. But the Edglings will find it liberating to get out of the stranglehold on information, communication, and the marketplace that centralized organizations attempt to impose.

The Edglings vs. the Centroids. I like it.

“The concept of audience remains valid.” At First Draft, Tim Porter responds to this post:

We are all each other’s audience. A good listener is an audience. So is a critic. Or someone who clicks on someone else’s Flickr photo. The publisher-audience relationship remains, but today it is a loop, not a pipe.

I agree with Tim. The audience hasn’t “gone away.” Porter: “The ‘audience’ is out there. Journalists need to be out there, too.”

Here’s the link to a French translation of this post: Le peuple jadis connu sous le nom d’audience. And here’s a response in French to the French translation.

Other reactions of note:

Ulises Ali Mejias of Teachers College at Columbia University: “Are we really talking about a community of producers, or a mass of producers? Put differently: Is production the new consumption? My argument is that TPFKATA function as a mass of producers…” (And see this Doc Searls reply to Mejias.)

Young PR professional Jeffrey Team at Inside the Cubicle: “Well Jay, the demise of the audience is not confined to journalism, it is pervasive in all communications…I am on a personal crusade to get the public relations industry to move away from the term target audience and instead think about communities of interest.”

Independent journalist Dave LaFontaine: “I can’t help but notice that when it comes to the actual, hard data on what sites people spend the majority of their time at … well, folks, it’s the Usual Suspects. Big media.”

Dave Cormier at his Education blog: “The revolution, if there is ever to be one, is going to take years of concerted effort. I applaud Mr. Rosen for his manifesto, I worry that too many people think we have already won.”

Andrew Cline at Rhetorica: “Exactly who are these people? It seems to me they are not the majority that makes up the semi-fictional ‘mass’ audience or the thing called ‘the public’ that so interested John Dewey and Walter Lippmann.”

Tom Matrullo at IMproPRieTies: “There is much to be said for the repeating of a theme or set of key ideas, encoded in such a way as both to pique attention and to convey to the already clued-in that a certain set of assumptions about speaking, writing, community formation, were in play, harboring large shifts in power, control, and dominance.”

Jon Husband at Wierarchy: “I notice two things …1 … the antibodies and immune system are really big, and are spread out everywhere; 2 … in addition to rejecting the foreign substance/bodies/players, the extant system is also trying to swallow ‘it’ … eat it so that the fever will be killed.”

Scott Walters asks how this post connects to the world of theatre, while elearnspace says, “I’m waiting for a similar announcement from learners in corporate and higher education,” and this blog (“advocacy strategy for the age of connectivity”) says “Rosen’s riff on the Audience is directly related to the way advocacy and organizing groups think about members and supporters.”

J-school student Ryan Sholin imagines a career path in journalism starting with “the community editor’s position.”

Wherein it’s my job to bootstrap the newspaper’s online connections to local bloggers and community members, launch hyperlocal sites comprised mostly of stories written by The People Formerly Known As The Audience, and manage them. This means learning some more web design and coding to modify some existing open source software, but the hard part is getting the community (and the editors) to see your newspaper as a place for participation.

From the incomparable Cursor, Media Patrol column, June 27 edition:

A new hire by Sen. Hillary Clinton, “to help improve [her] image among liberal bloggers,” is called “a major coup.”
Whereas to Billmon’s eye, ‘The Swiftboating of Kos’ is “starting to look more and more like a coordinated effort,” Ralph Nader finds that “after a while a chronically humorous way of looking at politics becomes a distraction,” as the nation’s political life assumes the binary position year after year.

A Texas governor’s race poll finds incumbent Gov. Rick Perry leading the pack — and Independent candidate Kinky Friedman in second place.

As Fox News employees are allowed to hear the whip cracking, ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’ proclaim “a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve heard about.”

The Economist in April 2006:

Almost everywhere, download speeds (from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which users might put as much into the network as they take out.
Exactly this, however, is starting to happen.

Seth Finkelstein dissents in the comments at Dan Gillmor’s blog:

Dan, we’re still the audience. If you don’t like my comment, you can personally attack me to a number of readers that is orders of magnitude more than I could realistically reach myself. I have no effective way to reply. That’s “audience”.
If I do volunteer journalism, but it is not propagated by A-list gatekeepers, and not appealing enough for the popular sites, it’ll be ignored. That’s “audience”.

And what happens if the professional journalist just doesn’t care if he or she gets it wrong, as long as it brings in the crowd? That’s “audience”.

Like the news media, Seth is an inflater of the balloons he pops. He refutes propositions I haven’t made: that the audience is no more, that media power has been equalized.

As I wrote in the comments to another poster:

The post I wrote does not say “the people” have the power now, and the media lost theirs. It says there’s been a shift in power. (And there has, but only a partial one.) It also speaks of a new “balance of power,” which is another way of talking about a limited change.
I’m not claiming that the power shift is total, or even decisive. Only that it’s signficant, and changes the equation.

Exclusive influence, monopoly position, the right to dictate terms, dynastic continuity, priestly authority, guild conditions for limiting competition— these have been lost, not the entrenched media’s social and market power, which as you say remain considerable.

Don’t miss the comments to this post.

Posted by Jay Rosen at June 27, 2006 1:26 AM Print

Anne and pluk, you illustrate my larger point perfectly.

I you say "I've been convicted" in a public space, everyone is going to assume that you have been convicted of a crime.

No, they wouldn't. If I said so in the context of an evangelical rally, for example - or even simply talking about a sermon at a mainstream Protestant worship service with other churchgoers, that would not be the case at all.

The fact that you have trouble grasping that is illustrative of the larger point - you lack the cultural information to make sense of the term, and would therefore have screwed it up had you reported on it.

On the micro level, that's not a terrible thing: I wouldn't expect the reflexively secular liberal to catch the use of the term in that context.

The problem arises when you have entire newsrooms full of people with the same outlook, and so nobody is capable of understanding it. And then assigning one of those people to the religion beat - which is how you get journalism laugh lines like "assault ministry," uncritical reporting on Al Gore's "where your heart is, there is your treasure also" (It should be obvious why Gore flunked out of divinity school), and most notoriously, "Poor, uneducated, and easy to command."

. It is not the responsibility of the press to understand your personal jargon

Except that it's not my personal jargon, but a very common expression. Just not in your limited circles. Actually, I haven't heard it in some time in Florida. I heard it a lot in Tennessee.

If you're going to cover the religion beat, it sure as hell IS the responsibility of the press to understand the language of the community. Actually, I would consider it to be a very basic responsibility of the reporter covering the beat.

You might want to make excuses for your ignorance, but you'd have to pay for that a lot by showing up in the corrections section. The fact that you resent having to learn it is telling.

words have meaning

Yes, they do. Too bad you don't understand them.

and when you use words in public spaces, you are responsible for those words.

Funny. Everyone else at the rally seemed to understand what "slay" meant. "Slain in the spirit" is a very common expression, with 5.4 million hits on Google.

The reporter at that rally, apparently, was the only knucklehead who didn't get it. Now who's the "uneducated" one?

It isn't the responsibility of the press to take special steps to understand you mean by "convicted"

Yes, it is. That is, if the mainstream press is not the intended audience to begin with, and if the press is starting out from a position of ignorance (not a bad assumption on the religion and military beats alike), then the reporter ought to take some time to educate himself in the field. At the very least, to doublecheck what he thinks he's hearing with someone who's not starting from a position of ignorance. Unfortunately, because of the lack of ideological diversity in newsrooms, he can't rely on his editors and colleagues for that very fundamental check and balance.

Simply put, if the reporter thinks it's not his responsibility to understand, then he should be fired, and replaced with someone who's either better educated, or a bit more curious.

Certainly not me, So let's end the suspense, sweetie -- what are you talking about ?

Darlin', if you don't already know, you just prove my point.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 29, 2006 1:02 AM | Permalink

Here's a couple of passages from Father Richard John Neuhaus in First Things: the Journal of Religion, Culture and Public Life:

An eager young thing with a national paper was interviewing me about yet another instance of political corruption. “Is this something new?” she asked. “No,” I said, “it’s been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden.” There was a long pause and then she asked, “What garden was that?” It was touching.

"uneducated," indeed. And this is from a national.

What prompts me to mention this today is that I’m just off the phone with a reporter from the same national paper. He’s doing a story on Pope Benedict’s new encyclical. In the course of discussing the pontificate, I referred to the pope as the bishop of Rome. “That raises an interesting point,” he said. “Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?”

Actually, I believe historically, they practice what is known as "telecommunion."

He obviously thought he was on to a new angle. Once again, I tried to be gentle. Toward the end of our talk, he said with manifest sincerity, “My job is not only to get the story right but to explain what it means.” Ah yes, he is just the fellow to explain what this pontificate and the encyclical really mean. It is poignant.

Touching, indeed. Our national media is sending innocent kids out to write serious stories on religion when the only thing their fund of information equips them to write is stories along the lines of "So what's the deal with the Pope's funny hat?"

And even then they'd need a backgrounder.

You gonna cover the fish? I don't think it's unreasonable to expect reporters to learn to swim.

Obviously, you're going to have glitches and mistakes here and there. But when journalism pros make excuses for their ignorance - when they wave away atrocious reporting on a rally as if the bad reporting is somehow the fault of the participants - and when editors and reporters, collectively, are not only utterly clueless about religious communities, but are in abject denial about how ill-informed they are (when somehow a liberal education and four year degree didn't imbue one national reporter with the cultural knowledge to comprehend a reference to the Garden of Eden), then there aren't going to be any meaningful improvements made.

The republic is not well-served by lousy quality control such as this. And it is not well-served by the cultural inbreeding that dominates our newsrooms, and makes Pauline Kael syndrome possible.

For those not in the know, Pauline Kael was a longtime film critic in New York. When Nixon slaughtered McGovern in the most lopsided, decisive election in living memory in 1972, Kael, touchingly, said "How can this be? I don't know a single person who voted for him!"

The fact that such an inbred, monolithic, homogenous culture is even possible in a national news organization ought to be a mark of shame for the big-city journalist community. It should have been corrected long ago.

You'd still have the occasional munchkin asking "What garden was that?" But the errors would be a lot less likely to see print.

Assault ministry, indeed.

More here, and a modest proposal:

I propose, for starters, that from now on editors assign religion stories only to reporters who know religion just as well as their publication's political reporters know politics and their sports reporters know sports.

Sounds reasonable to me.

But wait! Plukasiak thinks it's not a journalist's responsibility to "take special steps" in order learn the language and terminology of his beat!

I guess we're going to have to have a good purging of the ranks before we're intellectually equipped to take that little measure.

I'm not mocking simple inexperience, vemrion. And notice I'm not naming names - the experts rolling their eyes at the doe-eyed dorks calling them up from the nation's newsrooms are mercifully keeping the names of the reporters involved to themselves.

Rather, I'm mocking the willful embrace of ignorance and inexperience - which is itself rooted in the atrocious cultural skewing evident in newsroom demographics.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 29, 2006 11:40 AM | Permalink

Brilliant, Jay, and this has profound implications not only for all media but for commerce itself, since contemporary buying and selling paradigms are based on mass marketing. Without the mass -- or the perception of mass -- buying and selling returns to the commons, and success there requires more than Superbowl ads and the biggest budget. This will be the arena of opportunity in the months and years ahead, and the people formerly known as the audience will be on the front lines.

Posted by: Terry Heaton at June 27, 2006 9:38 AM | Permalink

There has always been an subset of the audience that wanted to be active (the actience?), but the tools that make it possible only just became available. The meteoric rise of computer gaming was an early indicator of the latent desire of the former audience to be participants.

There is also a subset of the audience that wants to be passive. There is something to be said for letting artists and experts entertain and inform you.

I also see a distinction between two flavors of the actience. There are those who manage passive media to take control of "the point of their engagement." They are still consumers but want to decide the terms of consumption. Then there are those who seek to create their own content. This group has the potential to truly shake things up because there has never been a time when there was more opportunity for anyone to produce, publish, and distribute original content.

But while anyone can now become a producer, producers still need an audience. And developing content for this new model audience will be challenging and exciting.

Posted by: Mark Howard @ News Corpse at June 27, 2006 12:29 PM | Permalink

I enjoyed reading this piece very much. It was inspiring and exciting. It is interesting to participate in different blogging communities and discover someone who writes like you. Thank you.

Posted by: Tamarika at June 27, 2006 2:56 PM | Permalink

Jay, fantastic. From a response here, I wanted to share a particular final thought:

"While Rosen shines the spotlight on the audiences of media, all of us are catching the reflected glow as participants in every marketplace. The points made above are not restricted to the world of media, or of journalism. They are, instead, another channel marker on a collaborative, generation-long journey where we all get to choose the ports-of-call."

Great piece.

Posted by: Christopher Carfi at June 27, 2006 5:59 PM | Permalink

I have only one quibble, Jay: You said that the old media system gave it's "operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others", but I'm not sure this is true.... the "exaggerated" part, that is. I think their power is very real, and not to be so easily dismissed. True, bloggers like most of us here have made some gains in recent years, but we are still nothing more than a mouse nibbling on the toes of a giant.

I agree with the spirit of your piece. Bloggers are on the rise, and we will change the world and the discussion. In the meantime, let's not forget that there are 5 or so media conglomerates who exercise a staggering amount of control over our viewing, reading and listening habits. My blog, cool as it may be, is not going to become a regular column in Newsweek anytime soon (unless I clean up my act like Wonkette... and get really popular). The media still has the power to put a piece of crap on the air in a hundred markets and see if it flies. The radio conglomerates still very much control what bands get on the air. If they don't like your songs (or your politics, your hairstyles, your lack of fealty, etc.), you don't get played and that's the end of that.

The entrenched media has several other advantages. If they see a new power rising on the internet, they have the resources to simply buy it, a la Rupert Murdoch and MySpace. Digg.com getting a little too much play for the NYT's taste? Buy'em out. They own this media landscape; we're just starting out. Their oligarchy will probably continue for years and most people will never know what they might've missed. For all the web's power, we are still in the infancy stage, or maybe the terrible twos. We've got a long way to go if we want to overthrow the old regime.

Posted by: vemrion at June 27, 2006 6:49 PM | Permalink

But how many people can afford to blog on such a lovely page as this? I wouldn't have read anything you said if this was posted at Blogger.com, or Myspace.com for that matter. Does that make me a snob?

And a voice online will cost you time and money: $15/year for a domain, $70/year for a host, some kind of education, at the very least knowledge of HTML, preferably CSS, and PHP. And still you might not be heard without SEO knowledge.

Posted by: PJ at Knowing Art at June 27, 2006 7:59 PM | Permalink

What is so weird is that the media seems to react so defensively and angrily. Well, I guess it's not weird. But it seems to me that if they want to KEEP us, they shouldn't go out of their way to alienate us by responding snippily or nastily to letters and complaints (mine are always politely worded, and I still get sarcastic responses from the editors and reporters). They shouldn't act like the half of their readers who vote for the party out of power are mere "partisans", like the very act of expressing your viewpoint means you can't possibly have a view worth considering.

I would also think they should figure out that they have to make themselves indispensable now that we have other options. Most bloggers can't do true investigative reporting-- only newspapers and other media that can pay salaries and legal fees can do that. So why are they wasting their money on high-priced pundits like David Brooks (pundits are a dime a dozen out there on the Web-- why bother to read an ill-informed and thoughtless column by Brooks when you can find other stuff on a dozen blogs)? They should get real reporters who know their jobs and correct mistakes before bloggers notice them (hopefully before they get into print). But instead they're replicating what blogs do better-- opinion-- and for free.
And instead of standing up to a rogue administration that wants to JAIL their colleagues for printing the truth, they fulminate against bloggers and allege dire conspiracies among those exercising their constitutional rights. The powers that want to deprive reporters of their constitutional rights? Well, thank God for Froomkin because at least he's noticing the wolf at the door.

Are editors and publishers really so stupid?
They are going to stupid themselves right into obsolescence.

Posted by: telly at June 27, 2006 11:46 PM | Permalink

I think for starters we need to get straight that the internet as we know it is a virtual commons made possible by several generations of Pentagon spending combined with government regulation to ensure net neutrality plus tax breaks to give online businesses competitive privileges.

The internet, online business models, and the active audience are the antithesis of free market deregulation in the standard issue plundering, neoliberal privatization-of-the-commons style. That's why net neutrality was dropped by the Bush FCC. Dropping net neutrality IS privatizing the virtual commons, yet another round of corporate accumulation via socialist subsidization of the corporate oligarchy. The GOP is socialist if you are in the Fortune 500. Individual responsibility is for the little people.

The active audience and the internet are Big Government plus government subsidies writ large. Nothing could be further from the "free market" cartels deregulation is determined to produce than the active audience and the internet as we know them. The Senate is debating whether to take it all back as we discuss this post.

If congress kills net neutrality, many of the issues this post raises will become moot for reasons directly traceable to the militant ignorance of neoliberal political philosophy.

Is the active audience politically active and effective enough to insist that their Senators keep the regulatory infrastructure in place that makes it possible for them to continue to be an active audience?

At this point, I would suggest we need a little more activism and a little less self-congratulation over our newfound agency and media autonomy. Absent net neutrality, the active audience will be a fantasy on the order of having our votes accurately counted this coming November. Talk to your Senators about net neutrality so that the issues Jay raises in this post are still real possibilities next week as well as this week.

History of the Future:

With the success of the Internet has come a proliferation of stakeholders - stakeholders now with an economic as well as an intellectual investment in the network. We now see, in the debates over control of the domain name space and the form of the next generation IP addresses, a struggle to find the next social structure that will guide the Internet in the future.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 27, 2006 11:46 PM | Permalink

Vemrion: I don't disagree with what you said.

The post I wrote does not say "the people" have the power now, and the media lost theirs. It says there's been a shift in power. (And there has, but only a partial one.) It also speaks of a new "balance of power," which is another way of talking about a limited change.

I'm not claiming that the power shift is total, or even decisive. Only that it's signficant, and changes the equation.

Exclusive influence, monopoly position, the right to dictate terms, dynastic continuity, priestly authority, guild conditions for limiting competition-- these have been lost, not the entrenched media's social and market power, which as you say remain considerable.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 27, 2006 11:55 PM | Permalink

This post is exactly what the official media need to hear. On the other hand, there's still the reality that most of us have to work mac jobs for a living no matter how big an audience we get on youtube.

Posted by: Incognita at June 28, 2006 6:52 AM | Permalink

This piece on media cluelessness on the religion beat was pretty entertaining - and a good example of why "The People Formerly Known as the Audience" (PFKA (TM)) have increasingly had it with the media.

Picture this scene. A flock of Pentecostal Christians has gathered at the U.S. Capitol for yet another prayer rally about sex, abortion, family values and the public square.

"At times, the mood turned hostile toward the lawmakers in the stately white building behind the stage," wrote The Washington Post in its coverage of the event. Then, without explanation, the story offered this on-stage quotation from a religious broadcaster: "Let's pray that God will slay everyone in the Capitol."

Slay what? Clearly, the reporters didn't know about the experience that Pentecostal Christians call being "slain in the Holy Spirit," in which they believe they are transformed by a surge of God's power. The result was a journalistic train wreck that ended up in the book The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect.

"The problem," wrote authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, "was that the reporters didn't know, didn't have any Pentecostals in the newsroom to ask, and was perhaps too anxious for a 'holy sh-t' story to double-check with someone afterward whether the broadcaster was really advocating the murder of the entire Congress." This mistake made "a strong case for the need for humility" at the news desk, they said.

A blog/commentary-friendly platform on the Web would go a long way towards ensuring such stupidy was quickly and soundly corrected.

Of course, few newspapers have thus far embraced the technology. I mean, really - why does someone else have to put together something like The Annotated Times (sadly, no longer running, it seems) or the single paper equivalent of memeorandum?

Just as important, though, hiring editors need to look beyond their bean-counting approach to diversity and reach out to new segments of the PFTA - that is to say, "Americans."

Bias is a problem. But, in my experience, apathy and ignorance cause most of these laugh-to-keep-from-crying gaffes. It would help if newsroom executives spent more time thinking about intellectual, cultural and even spiritual diversity, in addition to focusing on gender, race and class.

Preach it, brother!

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 28, 2006 9:39 AM | Permalink

Wow. Great piece Jay.

PJ, I have to say that if you really wouldn't read something because someone wrote it on Blogger, then you are a little shortsighted. This is about voice and content, not showy graphics.

I have two thoughts: one is that the shift in audience power is going to change scholarship as well. I'm not sure how yet, but it will come. One of the best things about scholarly publishing is that the work is vetted by other scholars, so sloppy analysis doesn't see the printed page. That said, there are probably great pieces of research that don't get printed too. I wonder what a reviewed journal would look like online...

The second is that there's a bunch of work on institutional organizational theory, and about how institutions promote themselves vis a vis their proprietary technology. But what hasn't been researched is what happens when institutions lose their technology. Take, for example, the post office. For years it had the only technology for shipping letters. Then along came fedex with a new technology for shipping, and UPS changed its strategy, and now there are many different ways to send thing, at different price points, etc.

The media is currently losing its technology. It turns out that the technology was distribution (and in the case of newspapers, the printing press). But the technology was not writing and reporting. That work turns out to be non-proprietary, and given the way the press organized itself, reporting can be done by anyone. This causes uproar in media. But it also provides a marvelous laboratory to study institutions in chaos and loss of control.

I live in an interesting time.

Posted by: JennyD at June 28, 2006 10:19 AM | Permalink

What Mark Anderson said a few posts up: if Net Neutrality isn't preserved, we may well wind up right back where we were. I doubt they'll ever make the pipeline completely one-way again, but they can make it a lot more one-way, and do a lot more crowding out of noncorporate content, than it is now.

So keep on leaning on your Senators. My advice would be, forget Snowe-Dorgan for now; better to ask your Senators that they kill the Stevens telecom bill altogether for this Congress and write a better bill next year. If the Senate bill passes, even with the Snowe-Dorgan Net neutrality amendment, there'll be a House-Senate conference committee to resolve differences in the bills, and Snowe-Dorgan won't survive conference.

JennyD - can't be sure, but one thing I'm reading in PJ's post is simply that having a blog on blogger.com doesn't mean anyone's reading what you write. As one such blogger, I speak from experience - there are millions of blogs out there, and just because you've got something to say doesn't mean anyone's going to read it. Fortunately, to a certain extent I'm writing just for my own satisfaction in being able to say what I want to say in my own space, even if not a soul is reading my words.

Posted by: RT at June 28, 2006 12:27 PM | Permalink

A couple of questions:

1. When "The People Formerly Known as the Audience" decide that the top story of the day is "Humble Grocer Gives Away Millions" -- a day when Israel has invaded Gaza -- is that altogether good? Are you (or other commenters who seem to agree with you) arguing the "Priests" at the NY Times should include more stories on the front page about humble grocers giving away millions of dollars? (Note that the Israel-Gaza story doesn't even show up on Digg's "World & Business" pages).

2. Will the "People Formerly Known as the Audience" be sending someone to Iraq, Gaza or Afghanistan?

Your manifesto may be a description of reality, or a reality to come. But I guess I am yet convinced we'll be better off, or better informed in this new world you're describing.

Put another way: I wish we in the "new media" world would spend more time focused on building services that really do allow us to be better informed and better entertained, and less time and effort issuing triumphalist declarations about the coming demise of mainstream media.

Posted by: Mark Hall at June 28, 2006 1:27 PM | Permalink

Right on, and well put.

What we're dealing with here is part of a generalized trend that grows naturally on the Net. That trend is toward the demand side supplying iself.

This is less a matter of power shifting than of power originating from a growing population of individuals and the organizations they form or reform. The trend is positive-sum. Maybe immeasurable-sum.

I just expanded on these observations in this post here. A pull-quote: It is impossible, however, to understand the new world we're making in terms of the old one we're also still living in. You might as well resurrect Ptolemy to explain Copernicus.

Posted by: Doc Searls at June 28, 2006 1:57 PM | Permalink

really great post, Jay! (looking fwd to seeing you later tonight at MGP, btw....)

What's come to my attention lately, though, is how many established newspapers and big media enterprises want to incorporate "citizen journalism" under their auspices--and that this might not serve the best interests of c.j.'s nor their communities...

Perhaps rather than being part of a local paper's web presence, citizen journalism might need to watchdog local media--as much as efforts like TPM watchdog Big Media. But if the established--and more easily located-- local "citizen journalism" is folded into the local paper's web presence (for whatever motive), where there is usually some editorial oversight, some c.j. stories might end up receiving an editorial spin much like the Front Page...

If that's the case, who are the c.j. posts serving? the community or the status quo? And if they're serving the status quo, isn't that defeating the purpose of people participating in media endeavors?

Further, what about the possibility of c.j's being used as "stringers" for the newsroom? There's potential for that to happen in almost any combined citj/establishment enterprise. Is that even ethical? Some might argue "yes" because the citizens are not true journalists, but that's specious reasoning.

The people may have the power, but who, really, might up with the control?

I don't mind the idea of journalists mentoring citizens in the practice of journalism (if they would like that mentoring) but when does mentoring become control?

I really hate to be the one playing devil's advocate, but sometimes one has to look at how the best intentions could lead straight back to the same old same old.

Posted by: tish grier at June 28, 2006 3:21 PM | Permalink

Where you see an audience I just see customers who bought their news and entertainment from publishers and broadcasters with their subscription dollars and their attention. (That attention was then resold to marketers who needed a means to find customers for their businesses.)

For years there were enough barriers to keep all the media's customers (both the audience and the advertisers) coming back no matter how disappointed they were in what the media provided them. As those barriers started to crumble the disappointed customers naturally began to look around for an alternative. And when they found one, they defected.

Barriers falling and customers defecting is a trend that has already completely disrupted the cozy in other industries. Now the bell tolls for the media. 'bout time.

BTW contemporary buying and selling paradigms are not based on mass marketing. Take a look at the shrinking share of the marketing dollar spend on "mass marketing" and you can see the trend.

Posted by: laurence haughton at June 28, 2006 4:36 PM | Permalink

Thanks for proving my point Jay. :-(

I thought you were better than that.

You left off the last part of my comment:

"Don’t shoot the messenger."

Is this the worst personal attack I've ever received in my life? No, not at all, by far. But it's illustrative of the inequality of audience, and it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at June 28, 2006 4:57 PM | Permalink

Great post. I am an educator and I recently wrote an economics lesson considering the nature of monopolies in the beginning of the Twenty First Century. I encouraged students to consider if it would be harder to establish a monopoly today than 100 years ago. The think the answer is unequivocably yes. The Internet and the communication tools on it have given the activist much greater power to make his/her own voice heard. However, there are still many people who choose not to exert their own voice. They remain the audience.

Andy Pass
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html

Posted by: Andrew Pass at June 28, 2006 6:13 PM | Permalink

Jay: point taken concerning the shifting bit. I think we're in the very beginning of this shift. The possibilities are suddenly there. I can take on CBS if I was insane enough. I can start a net radio station or an online publication like Wayne Madsen. We are not on their level.... but at least we're in the game.

At any rate, I'm just glad to have a voice through my blog; that choice wasn't even there before, except for photocopied 'zines that were popular in underground music scenes during the 80s and 90s. At least on the web my site has an address, just like CNN. Of course the telco companies want to change that (I'd be curious to know your take on Net Neutrality, btw). The fact that the telecom companies have seen fit to respond to the net's power by threatening to restrict the voices of those who don't pay "protection money" is strong evidence for your point.

Still, I think it's going to be a long time before the playing field is level. If the established corporations have their way that day will never come. I fear that they will manage to co-opt the movement before it gets too strong. In some ways, I'd rather you didn't let the MSM know what kind of threat they're facing so they will be blindsided, but that's just me thinking tactically. :-)

Ah well. Let it never be said that the bloggers didn't warn the media that systemic change was coming.

Posted by: vemrion at June 28, 2006 7:33 PM | Permalink

RE: Economist in After Matter, "This is because the corporate giants that built these pipes ..."

Idiots.

I blame Joseph Lechleider. John Cioffi, too.

Posted by: Gave up 56k for DSL at June 28, 2006 8:12 PM | Permalink

Quick survey - If I said I was "convicted," how many of you guys would know what I was talking about?

I you say "I've been convicted" in a public space, everyone is going to assume that you have been convicted of a crime. If you say "I hope the President is slain" in a public space, everyone is going to assume that you want the President killed.

...and it makes perfect sense for everyone to do so. It is not the responsibility of the press to understand your personal jargon; words have meaning and when you use words in public spaces, you are responsible for those words.

It isn't the responsibility of the press to take special steps to understand you mean by "convicted", any more than its the responsibility of the press to take special steps to know what you mean by "I" and "was" in the sentence "I was convicted".

Posted by: plukasiak at June 28, 2006 8:49 PM | Permalink

Just a shout-out here to an extremely topical new Paul Graham essay, The Power of the Marginal, a fringe's-eye view of how innovation comes from the fringe.
He writes from a web/software/art background, and sees the same forces and patterns there.

Excerpts -
"Much of the skill of experts is the ability to ignore ... But focus has drawbacks: you don't learn from other fields, and when a new approach arrives, you may be the last to notice.
... As well as being more comfortable working on established lines, insiders generally have a vested interest in perpetuating them.
... The really juicy new approaches are not the ones insiders reject as impossible, but those they ignore as undignified."

and much much more.

I could relate to the "dog" part.
:-)

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 28, 2006 10:13 PM | Permalink

Quick survey - If I said I was "convicted," how many of you guys would know what I was talking about? -- Jason Van Steenwyk

Frankly, Jason, as always, it's a great mystery exactly what you are talking about.

Perhaps you're talking about being "convicted" of howling at the moon because a couple of newspapers printed a story that has been around for four years, ever since The Counter Terrorism Blog and a 2002 United Nations report revealed the same thing ?

Or perhaps you're talking about how, egged on by the White House, knowing as they do how to create a useful diversion, you took the bait ?

Who knows ? Certainly not me, So let's end the suspense, sweetie -- what are you talking about ?

Posted by: Ann Kolson at June 28, 2006 10:43 PM | Permalink

viva la revolucion...

"I’ll admit that I’m out of my league here debating with Rosen, but i’ve watched my partner blog with a baby with a full Maternity leave. It’s really hard to make the time to make that happen… the citizen, i think, is a bit more complex than mr. Rosen is letting on.

I’ve been called back to the blog today by an article that i came to through Stephen. Jay Rosen wrote a rousing article that came out of, apparently, his bloggercon presentation. It’s entitled, the people formerly known as the audience and talks in broad tones about the the coming of the revolution, how the people have been empowered, and how the world will change along with the media."

Posted by: dave cormier at June 28, 2006 10:48 PM | Permalink

If that was Dave Cormier, he didn't link to his actual post on the topic.

But the technology was not writing and reporting. That work turns out to be non-proprietary, and given the way the press organized itself, reporting can be done by anyone. - JennyD

In theory, reporting can be done by anyone. (I am equating reporting and blogging here.) But in practice, according to Cormier:

And change comes when EVERYONE is in on the revolution. How much time do the single mothers have to blog? We did get a call from the western sahara on a brainstorm the other night… magical for its rarity. (and not exactly culturally representative of the rest of the people in that camp) You work all day, you see your kids, kiss the husband/wife have a beer, go to bed. Oh, and probably turn on your TV. Do you spend three hours configuring your RSS feed? not so much.

Posted by: Hue at June 29, 2006 12:33 AM | Permalink

Mark Hall writes: Are you (or other commenters who seem to agree with you) arguing the "Priests" at the NY Times should include more stories on the front page about humble grocers giving away millions of dollars?

No, I'm not. Other commenters will speak for themselves. This is not a post about what the New York Times should be doing. It's about who has joined the New York Times in the "press" space.

Quick question, are you saying that more bloggers should do posts attempting to calculate how many times a famous married couple could have possibly screwed each other over the last few years?

Will the "People Formerly Known as the Audience" be sending someone to Iraq, Gaza or Afghanistan?

No, probably not. Well, maybe. Let's back up. They sent Chris Allbritton to Iraq in 2003. (See this.) They sent Josh Marshall to New Hampshire in 2004. I believe they've sent Michael Yon to Iraq to report, as well.

I wouldn't make big claims about a short track record like that. These are tiny experiments. But they allow us to go forward with an idea that maybe there are other ways... Certainly that has yet to be proven.

I wish we in the "new media" world would spend more time focused on building services that really do allow us to be better informed and better entertained, and less time and effort issuing triumphalist declarations about the coming demise of mainstream media.

I agree about building stuff that works being more important than declarations like this one. More important, harder, realer in its consequences.

But... Where in this post do you see any declaration about mainstream media's demise? I say it's not there. In fact, you may be engaging in hype when you say that.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2006 12:52 AM | Permalink

Not long ago, we had a world where the "story of the day" was decided by a small number of professional journalists.

Today, it is a little more split, with conservative talk radio providing a second nexus.

In the future...

The raw facts of political and economic news are still often only available to the established press, which has people with the time, funds and credentials to get it. As long as this is true, the power of the audience to produce news is limited.

However, the audience can create its own circles of opinion, where the framking of issues is distributed into these blogs. This doesn't produce more facts, but it does interject political (or whatever) bias in a different way.

But perhaps the most active thing most in the "former audience" will do is choose from a much wider set of "channels" - frequently locking only onto those that match their existing biases.

I fear that this trend will lead to increasingly disparate groups, each in its own echo chamber. The far left will Kossify. The right will... well, add blogs to talk radio. Many people will no longer be exposed to contradictory opinions (of course, the soft left, if it continues to feed off of the MSM, will continue to never see contradictory opinions anyway).

America today seems strongly and rigidly divided. How much of that is already the result of having two primary viewpoint sources - the MSM (roughly, for the left) and talk radio (mostly for the right)? Do the blogs change this? Amplify it? Change a bipolar split into a multipolar chaos? Or do they really not do much most of the time?

Posted by: John Moore at June 29, 2006 1:50 AM | Permalink

First off I love the letter. It is a nice ideal, and I do believe that there is a big shift going on, and the landscape is getting ever so more blurred. I look forward to a world when sites like the news is now public, and others can afford to buy cable stations, and podcasts are carried on satelite radios stations. It will be neat to see how the media landscape is in 5 years.. who comes out on top, who gets the most views, not just who is talking, but more importantly who is listening, and to what... perhaps we can all have a hand in this to amke it better!

Posted by: Jessica at June 29, 2006 2:17 AM | Permalink

Thanks Hue, yes, that was the same person. I always feel weird linking directly to my own post in someone's comments... kinda feel like someone else should do that if they feel that my post is relevant.

And Jay, as you well know, while you didn't 'say' anything about the demise of the media, the tone of the post does certainly suggest something. It's about audience i suppose... correct tone for bloggercon and people who would like to go there if they were more geographically/fiscally fortunate... maybe not so much for people more skeptical and less bloggish.
But then, you never said you were trying to convert anyone. It's an open letter to THE MAN (although i did notice a woman sneak in there, which has got to be a good sign) and with them as an audience, they are warned, should take notice, and they will continue, I suppose, to try and control the internet.

Posted by: dave cormier at June 29, 2006 7:44 AM | Permalink

Jason: Actually "Slain in the spirit" only gets 50,000 hits in Google when you include the quote marks. Otherwise you're including all pages with "spirit" and "slay" anywhere in the text. Including the quotes makes sure that they are actually talking about the phenomenon you're referring to.

Incidentally, I hope you are fine with people viciously mocking you when you are inexperienced with something, since you seem to take so much joy in mocking others. The "golden rule" and all. Google it if you don't know what I'm referring to. :-)

Posted by: vemrion at June 29, 2006 9:48 AM | Permalink

You're late and a dollar short, Jason. USA Today beat you to the rant with this Op/Ed. And with considerably less bluster that the journalistic world has gone straight to hell.

Look around and you'd notice that most media outlets are aware of the problem and have taken steps - with varying degrees of success - to create more professional and more informed reporting on religion and faith. For nearly a decade, newspapers of varying sizes have given more space, more time and more reporters to cover religion. That's hardly a sign of not caring.

Mistakes happen. Ill-informed reporters and their gaffes are embarrassing. And worse, fuel half-formed analysis that the media are involved in "the willful embrace of ignorance and inexperience - which is itself rooted in the atrocious cultural skewing evident in newsroom demographics."

So relax. Soon enough, it seems, the light of a million blogs will shine. The audience will provide the news and mistakes will be a thing of the past.

Posted by: Dave McLemore at June 29, 2006 1:42 PM | Permalink

Jay,

This issue is not one that is confined to journalism, it is relevant to communications as a whole. As a public relations practitioner, I am trying to get my colleagues to move away from the idea of "target audiences" and think about "communities of interest."

The idea of audiences was borrowed from the marketing/advertising world. It is predicated on a myth of control that clearly does not exist today.

Tim Porter talks about the "loop" that must exist, and I agree not everyone craves that interaction. However, communicators (journalists, PR people, marketers, etc.) must recognize that individuals at least want taht option, and more importantly, view two-way communications as more credible.

A community needs to have the capability of sharing and collaboration. An audience does not.

Goodbye audience, you never really had a chance

Posted by: Jeffrey Treem at June 29, 2006 2:03 PM | Permalink

What objective measure would reliably tell an editor which "reporters know religion, politics or sports?" (BTW business reporting suffers also when business reporters don't know business.)

University degrees are no guarantee of knowing anything are they? And experience is equally unreliable? I'm just asking...

Posted by: laurence haughton at June 29, 2006 3:31 PM | Permalink

Really enjoyed this post and the comments. Thanks. Your (?) line:

If all would speak who shall be left to listen?

Reminded me of that great ironic line from A Passage to India: "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." I work on the website of a slow-moving, congenitally-print trade title and what makes our journalists resistant to buying into digital and two-way mediums is exactly that fear: that by welcoming strange, new things into our space we diminish our own sense of what we are.

It's natural to talk about the 'old' media in terms of power wielded, because that's the public currency of the classic producer/audience relationship. I think it's worth remembering, though, that for most journalists their chosen career is crucial not just to their financial stability but also to their self-definition - you can apply to journalism the German aphorism about teaching: Lehren ist kein Beruf, sondern eine Berufung. (How's my German? Call 0800-QREKT-IT-Y'SELF.)

What the print staff I work with are nervous about isn't losing power over an audience, it's losing their profession and professional identity to a medium they look at in the same way 18th century weavers did the spinning jenny.

Finding a new relationship between (ex-)producers and (ex-)audience seems to me to hinge a great deal on changing those attitudes at the coalface (I'm not saying they're widespread, by the way - they're clearly much less in evidence on something like Guardian - I'm just wondering about how this revolution will come to the smaller, less glamorous bits of the media like the one I work in).

Posted by: Nathan at June 29, 2006 4:43 PM | Permalink

Dave,

Thanks for the link. Actually, that USA Today article was the first piece I linked to.

But thanks for trying to keep up! ;-)

For nearly a decade, newspapers of varying sizes have given more space, more time and more reporters to cover religion. That's hardly a sign of not caring.

Your confusing a qualitative problem and solution with a quantitative one. No one has mentioned there's not enough coverage. Just that reporters are ignorant. More ignorant reporters who all come from the same knee-jerk secular-left background only compound the problem.

If coverage sucks, adding more sucky coverage from sucky reporters just sucks that much more.

Same with the military beat: Putting more reporters on the military beat does no good when the editorial standards are so pathetic you can sneak in a reference to "Purple Stars," confuse a sergeant with an officer, and assert that we award the Medal of Honor for songwriting.

I'd trade ten of those idiots for one good one. And we should pay the good ones a lot more to do what they do.

The first step, though, is in firing the editors who insist that journalists are "under no obligation to take special steps to understand" their beats.

To the extent that that view is widely held - and I'm the only one on this board so far to attack it - that fundamental arrogance and laziness is itself the root of the problem, and the chief hurdle that needs to be overcome.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 29, 2006 5:27 PM | Permalink

please folks. stop responding to Jason. don't let him hijack this thread with worn out old gripes, (Purple Stars, again?) we heard you 100 comments ago.

Posted by: anti Jason at June 29, 2006 5:40 PM | Permalink

Jason: your tactics are getting tiresome. Proving that journalists don't know squid about crab... tiresome. Also fishy.

Nathan: I loved, "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." I think it is very apt. Professional journalists often fail to appreciate how deeply they identify against rather than with the public. It doesn't sound as noble (the "against" part) but it's actually crucial to professional identity.

David Remnick, if you ask him about editing the New Yorker, says he doesn't take orders from readers, and wouldn't. He's suspicious of giving the readers what they want. I worry about pleasing myself, he says. If I didn't, I'd wind up with a really bad magazine, he says.

By identify against I also mean they build up their professional selves by contrasting the disciplined practices of a pro journalist to what's normally expected of sloppy, biased, overly passionate or easily distracted civilians, your average Joe and Jane.

For example: "You Howard Deaniacs out there, you are interesting people to write about; you see just one side of the issues, and that's fine... for you. We're journalists and we'd like to be passionate too, but we have to see both sides of the issues. You don't. You do understand that, right...?"

And it's a short step from there to defining yourself by formula. In order for me to be the balanced pro I need you to be the imbalanced partisan. Sometimes these needs can get out of hand.

Thus, Nathan says of his shop: "What makes our journalists resistant to buying into digital and two-way mediums is exactly that fear: that by welcoming strange, new things into our space we diminish our own sense of what we are."

The people in the audience are supposed to stay in their seats. That's what many journalists feel about what's called the read-write-Web. Stay in your seats. Stay where we put you.

Of course some don't feel that way. (An outstanding example of one.) They welcome the writing readers because they know if they don't they can't really welcome the read-write-Web into their journalism.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2006 9:41 PM | Permalink

Jay, try to pay attention.

Clearly you do not understand that Jason is the expert par excellence on all matters -- military, religious, journalistic, and, even more breathtaking, constitutional. (All matters, that is, except ones that pertain to the actual topic of this post.)

That he is not yet on the Supreme Court is only one of life's cruel ironies.

Yet, oddly, he has yet to respond to the observation that the administration's program of tracking international bank transactions has been public knowledge for at least four years -- ever since The Counter Terrorism Blog and a United Nations report in 2002 revealed the same information.

That's why it's so important not to get messed up with facts -- they're so damned inconvenient.

Posted by: Ann Kolson at June 29, 2006 10:55 PM | Permalink

No worries, the New York Times has the SWIFT program under control.

Meanwhile, Ann Kolson ridicules Jason so he'll go back to his seat and Stay There.

I concluded that Ann's ridicule of others at PressThink answers Siegal's questions:

Should we be responding systematically to outside critics who attack our believability for political or commercial reasons of their own? What is an effective vehicle for doing this?

It's not about the "little" errors, Jason, it's about the majesty of knowing.

Posted by: Tim Schmoyer at June 29, 2006 11:39 PM | Permalink

"Jason: your tactics are getting tiresome. Proving that journalists don't know squid about crab... tiresome. Also fishy."

This is beyond hilarious. The Lefties here are annoyed that someone is saying perhaps it would be a good idea if reporters knew a little about the topics they were covering to avoid mistakes.

Posted by: andrew at June 30, 2006 12:54 AM | Permalink

Van Steenwyk --

To drag this thread back to its original topicŠ: your long-held position in advocacy of cultural and ideological diversity in newsroom hiring is stipulated.

The relevant question here is the one alluded to by McLemore. To what extent will the shifting of the center of gravity of journalism away from the professionals those newsrooms hire towards these PFKA, to use Rosen's formulation, be a better remedy for the Kaelesque problems of cultural blindness you cite -- solving them not through ideological affirmative action in hiring but by outreach to expertise in the universe known as the "former audience?"

Or, to paraphrase Moore, to what extent will the PFKA be so atomized and riven along ideological lines that not only will the professionals lack ideological diversity but the amateurs too? Moore¹s future seems to be a Balkanization where one segment, for example, would talk in nothing but Biblical terms while another uses nothing but secular language.

By the way: you never did tell us what being "convicted" does mean in the Pentecostal sense of the word. Is it just olde English for "convinced" or does it have similar overtones to the "slain" formulation, in that somehow one has been conquered by one¹s beliefs?

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at June 30, 2006 1:13 AM | Permalink

Today on Anderson Cooper, I learned that Usama bin-Laden and al-Zawahiri of al-Qaida are two of those "people formerly known as the audience." They used to send their videos to al-Jazeera, but al-Jazeera's editing and censorship became tiresome and overweening. Also, sending a person to one of the very few al-Jazeera offices became a clear security risk.

Consequently, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri now upload their video and audio clips directly to the web from Pakistani internet cafes, cutting out the hierarchical chokepoint in the Middle East's broadcast media system.

One of the guest experts was clearly about to close with some reflexive al-Jazeera bashing and then realized as he was speaking that it's out of al-Jazeera's hands now, so in spite of himself he was left having to hold bin Laden and al-Zawahiri responsible for their own actions and to leave the "media conspiracy" diatribe out of it altogether.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 30, 2006 2:39 AM | Permalink

Wow, amazing how much this post was bounced around the blogosphere, like it's something new. You posted about this the phrase 18 months ago in your Top Ideas of 2004 blog post, and it seemed pretty clear what you meant at the time.

Jay, I admire your enthusiasm, your ability to headline a conference panel, and the loyalty of your readership, er, your commentership. But here at the Media Giraffe conference, the gathered media professionals and citizen-media-producers pretty much accept this formulation that you gave at the Wednesday night opening panel-- and then we moved on to discussing applications of this. Yesterday, Fabrice Florin introduced his NewsTrust endeavor and the worthy research under it, and Michael Skoler of MPR gave a brilliant talk about the Public Insight Network. It's these specific applications of digital media (or TPFKATA if you