Belatedly I'm posting the link to an interesting thread revived last week by the NYU journalism scholar Jay Rosen on what he criticizes as the uncritical "he said, she said" characteristic of some reporting.

Rosen identified a National Public Radio story in which two conflicting views were granted about the same weight. In his view, one of those parties was lacking in credibility, but the journalist seemed to take the view that the audience could decide so.

As he sees it (and has written earlier), this passivity is a problem in journalism. Standards should be high enough to not just give airspace to anyone, and Rosen views it as washing your hands of determining what's true.

In the end, he concludes, it's at the very least lame.
 
 
The New York University scholar, Jay Rosen, has made an enormous contribution to the understanding of journalism's direction, practice and relationship to the public. He is fast approaching 25 years of teaching and has distilled his views into four simple points.

1. The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be.

2. The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.

3. The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people.

4. Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us.

His post elaborates on these ideas, and some remain highly unconventional, particularly the assertion that journalists should correct the craft's emphasis on objectivity (that View from Nowhere).  He thinks the emphasis needs to be on narrative, public participation, and useful opinions.

What do you think?
 
 
New York University's Jay Rosen never fails to be instructive, but his latest lesson is an intriguing exercise in self-criticism.

Rosen sent an errant Tweet this week on seeming corporate pressure involving a subsdiary of AOL --- what he calls "a serious error" --- and he has not only corrected the 140-character mistake but provided an extensive chronology of its pathology.

Before Rosen could correct, his Tweet had spread to a six-figure audience. He found undoing the mess problematic, in particular the weight of making a mistake with his professional credentials behind him.

His case study of his foul-up is an excellent example, though, of how to thoroughly explain how a mistake was made and his thinking along the way. Rosen has Tweeted 15,000 times, but this acknowledgment does nothing to take away from the contribution he has made. If anything, it enhances it.

 
 
In an essay for Technology Review, NYU journalism professor and online-savvy Jay Rosen questions the definition of journalism, now that the social pattern of creation and consumption has been altered by the arrival of digital media.

Rosen notes that journalism has been conducted for the most part inside the media industry, but that the old production cycles --- the daily paper, the broadcast or the magazine --- have been disrupted by the always-on-deadline Internet.

"Journalists insist that their habitual practices are not artifacts of a technological era but the essence of good journalism. They shouldn't do that," he says. These days, "journalism is not the media."
 
 

NYU's Jay Rosen recently spoke to science writers in New York about the media revolution --- in particular, the lowering of costs of entry for everyone to possess the tools to communicate with each other --- and Twitter. His 10-minute video is a good insight into his academic work and outlook.

 
 

New York University's Jay Rosen asserts that the authority of the press is weakened by the Internet. To simplify his idea, it's because the one-to-many of legacy media has been replaced by a one-to-many-who-share dynamic.

It's no longer a matter of being connected "up" to the media, but out to others. The audience "atomization" has been overcome.

"In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number."

Rosen provides a good look at what constitutes legitimate debate and other public spheres in information. It's a worthwhile read.

 
 

New York University professor Jay Rosen has contributed an immense understanding to the evolution of media. In this clip he's talking to the Carnegie Council on the arrival of a link ethic that ought to guide media in networking with each other's content.

 
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