Jay Rosen on Journalism in the Internet Age

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In a break from our usual practice of focusing on books, we asked the journalism analyst and veteran blogger to recommend five articles illustrating the upheavals of the news business

I know that as journalists we have to adapt rapidly to new ways of doing things, but you've really thrown me in at the deep end – you’ve chosen five online articles instead of five books, and we’re doing the interview on Google chat rather than by telephone.

I like to do things differently. For example, using PressThink for longform blogging – which wasn't the normal thing at the time, in 2003.

Will you give me an overall sense of what you are saying about changes in journalism with the articles you've chosen?

Well, first there's been a shift in power. The users have more than they did because they can publish and connect to one another, not just to the media. Second, the people formerly known as the audience are configured differently. They are connected horizontally as well as vertically, which is why today we speak of social media. This is what I sometimes call “audience atomisation overcome”. Third, the media still have power and journalism still matters. In some ways the essence of it has not changed. But a lot of what journalists did became bound up with particular forms of production and distribution. Since the web has radically altered those forms, it has radically changed journalistic work, even though the value of good journalism remains the same – timely, accurate, useful information that tells us what's happening in our world over the horizon of our personal experience.

Edit This Page

Let’s look at the first article you’ve chosen, which dates from May 1999. It’s by Dave Winer, and is titled “Edit This Page”. Can you tell me why it’s on your list? I don’t come from a tech background, so it was quite hard for me to follow.

OK, I will explain why this piece is so important. The summer and fall of 1999 is when blogging software first emerged. Prior to that time, web publishing existed, but you had to know some code to have your own page on the web. There were people doing a kind of proto-blogging, but they were geeks. What Dave Winer is talking about in this piece is how we can make the leap from the “read only” web – a web that most people can only read – to the “read-write web”, a platform where the average person is both an author and a user of stuff others author.

The key moment is in the title: “Edit this Page”. If every page can be easily edited by the users, then the users can be publishers. And the static web gives way to something much more exciting and participatory and social. For example, if we combine the ease of self-publishing with domain expertise – people who know a lot about a given area, like the mortgage industry – what do we get? We get not only niche blogs by experts, but also a different power relationship between them and the professional media. Dave later summarised this as: The sources can go direct. All this was being sketched out in May 1999, before anyone realised what a force blogging and social media would be.

Open-Source Journalism

That ties in nicely with your next choice, which is a story about Jane’s Intelligence Review, a journal for spies, using input from users of Slashdot, a “news for nerds” website, to improve a story about cyber-terrorism.

So here we see another form of the power shift. The users have more power, not only because they can self-publish but also because they can pool their knowledge, and criticise superficial treatments in the professional media. Knowing this, Jane's decided to make the users co-authors, which expresses the new balance of power I just talked about.

That site, slashdot.org, was one of the first really effective online communities. So this piece in Salon, also from 1999, is an example of an extremely important insight that my friend Dan Gillmor had, again in 1999. Gillmor first got turned on to how powerful blogging would be when he saw a demo from – guess who? – Dave Winer. Winer showed him how “edit this page” worked. He talked Gillmor into starting a blog at the San Jose Mercury News, where he was a columnist and reporter on Silicon Valley. As the first newspaper journalist to have a blog, Gillmor realised something crucial: “My readers know more than I do.” In the aggregate, that is. This is the same thing Jane's realised.

And it addresses a problem that traditional journalism always faced, which is that as a reader, whenever you read an article about something you know a lot about, the journalist normally gets it wrong.

Exactly, which over time wears away at the trust that is necessary for serious journalism to exist. So combine “my readers know more than I do” with “open source journalism” and “the sources go direct”, and you have a reply to that problem.

I can see how it applies to specialist areas – cyber-terrorism, drugs, finance. But does it also apply to general news?

In some ways, yes. Except we have to modify it to, “Our readers are located in more places than we are”, or, “Our readers are more connected to each other than we are”. Put them together and what do you have? News, like an earthquake in LA, that breaks first on Twitter. Or coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 that was originally dominated by users with cameras who were on scene.