By Jay Rosen: PRESSthink: The Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine - March 25, 2004.

The Open Practice and a Free Press

Journalism is a demanding practice; and only in principle--a pretty important principle--is "anyone" or "everyone" able to do it. It might surprise some at BloggerCon that journalists do not always like to be called professionals. Many don't buy it, and they will argue with you if you say journalism is a profession. The first time I met with this attitude, I didn't understand it. You won't find social workers, pharmacists, dentists or public school teachers grabbing your lapels to say: We're not a profession, buddy. Got that? But in journalism you get this argument often.

Why? Well, it's part of a larger argument-- for freedom in the press. "Journalism is a profession" only makes sense if you officially qualify people as journalists. That's what a profession does: restrict the practice to the qualified ones. The bid for public trust follows from that initial division between the qualified and the not. "I'm a licensed teacher, trust me with your child."

Journalists sometimes join in those kinds of restrictions (the press pass, for example) and they often do think, "we're the pros at this...you're not. " But the deeper feeling among many is that journalism should always be open, unrestricted, in principle there for anyone, qualified or not, experienced or not, because to restrict the practice to approved voices is ultimately hostile to a free press. That's why they say: we're not a profession, don't call us that.

The Professionals Set a Standard

So to argue that professionals don't own journalism is no disrespect to professionals. It's simply another way of calling for a free press, of preserving journalism as an open and democratic practice. The truth is that the people who do it for a living, because they are able to do it for a living, set a high standard for excellence, and--despite all kinds of problems--for basic accuracy in reporting.

Meanwhile, the capacity of the major news organizations to find out what's happening, to package and deliver it to people, dwarfs any alternative capacity out there-- including, of course, the weblogs. What I mean by "dwarfs" includes facts like the news and editorial budget at the New York Times: $180 million a year for a staff of 1,200. (See this.) That translates into power, as when The Times won a reprieve from Internet censorship in China because "its former editor appealed personally to former President Jiang Zemin."

Even at two million weblogs and counting, the blog sphere isn't in the same category or dimension as an institution like the Times, and that's only one of hundreds of rich and powerful firms in the journalism biz (including nonprofit firms like NPR.) The weblog sphere isn't an institution at all, and whatever strengths it has probably derive from that.

My own feeling is that amateur journalists, citizens, webloggers should take seriously the existing standard in the institutional press. They should understand what goes into meeting it, and even emulate professional journalism from time to time-- when it fits with the author's purposes. These are self-defined. And when they are not, a weblog is starting to become something else, more familiar to us. In the worst case, it's PR or propaganda.

Of course, none of this means we should back off for a moment from criticism of a powerful institution, the press, or that all-surrounding complex, The Media. Both need it, and this is one of the first demands that weblogs, including this one, responded to. But when you free "journalism" from those two things--The Press, The Media--it's easier to talk about the practice and what weblogs may add to it.

Passage to the Public Sphere

Even if only a tiny amount of "real journalism" (however you define it) goes on at weblogs, there is significance in a simpler fact: blogs represent passage to the public sphere. Citizens of any kind who decide to take up their pens and write their thoughts down at their own self-titled, self-published magazines--and there are a lot of those already--could, at any time, pick up the reporter's notebook too. The first place they are likely to head is some event that concerns them-- maybe the school board.

Are amateur correspondents unlikely to emerge en masse? Extremely so. And maybe their chance for a mass audience is nil. But picture them anyway. Were they to go out and report the world, the weblog is already there, an outlet to the sea. By starting to blog as a journalist, they can navigate to the open waters of the Web, and follow their own course in journalism to... who knows?

This is what openness means. It takes a stunted or cynical mind to find no importance in it. Any increase in human freedom--what people are now free to do for themselves--adds to democratic possibility. The weblog, I think, is an addition like that in journalism. Read James Wolcott in Vanity Fair on the blogs. He agrees.

No one owns the practice. In principle, it's anyone's game. The press doesn't own journalism, entirely. And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends "the press" to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night.

Journalism is Done for a Public

Journalism can be a commercial thing, done for money, or a noncommercial thing, done for love. It may be done as a public service, a way of entering into political debate, or for the simple and practical reasons people have always shared information or "talk." It can be a purely human and expressive act. And, of course, it is sometimes done for reasons of power.

But what most identifies the practice of journalism is not power, profit, or free expression in itself. It's the idea of addressing, engaging and freely informing a "public" about events in its world. It is an interesting question how many people it takes for, say, a political weblog to have a political public. I don't know that it has an answer.

Philosophers disagree on whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, if no ear hears it. But it is certain that the tree does not make news. Until it hits a house, and civilization gets involved. Then a public interest is at stake. Now there can be news. Journalism has something to do with things seen at stake in the world for a group of inter-connected people who share that world. Those are the people I'm calling a public.

To get even more elemental about it, and to go back further in time: Before you can have journalism, certain patterns in human settlement need to arise. The scale must be enlarged enough so that things happening all around the settlement are hard to know about without a lot of extra effort. Self-contained worlds on a truly human scale don't need many journalists and may have none. Life there is self-informing.

Modern Scale and the Awayness of Things

I once tried to characterize this condition as the "awayness" of things. The harbor town small enough so that everyone knows when a new ship arrives needs no provider of shipping news. By going about its business, the town already has the news, so to speak. You could say that everyone's a journalist around the harbor. You could say that no one is, which is probably wiser.

In this sense, journalism is modern because the scale that requires it is modern. Big developments in the awayness of things--wars, for example, or a growth in the scale of economic activity--always drive, transform and unsettle journalism. It seems we're at such a point now. The Internet is a rather big development in the awayness of things.

If some say we are verging on a new era in citizens’ media; if they are tempted to phrase it melodramatically, as in "now the audience has a printing press," or "now everyone's a journalist," then our discussion at BloggerCon must admit into evidence all the ways these statements misidentify the reality and over-estimate or misconstrue the weblog's (so far) modest effects-- all the ways they aren't true.

But at the same time, it's helpful to isolate the handful of ways that such sweeping and lyricized statements are true. "Now everyone can be a journalist" may be too idealistic, or just hype. But it speaks to a verifiable fact: barriers to entry have come way down in Web publishing. Monopolies of knowledge are being ended here and there. And there are in fact more citizen journalists out there today who do have their own printing press and perhaps a public too. They are interacting with the press more and more, criticizing it a lot. They are making use of their outlet to the sea.

From the following posted article: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/03/25/con_prep.html#more