Traditionally, professional journalists have presented themselves as mediators, whether between ideas and readers, events and historians, celebrities and the public, or the state and its subjects. Now that anyone can communicate to millions with just a cell phone, that gatekeeper role has grown less and less relevant. However, emergent forms of journalism continue to give our exchanges structure, even if they aren’t the structures we’ve come to immediately recognize.
Journalism was once defined as “what professional journalists do.” Today, journalism can be re-described as a community’s conversations with itself. The role of the journalist can be re-imagined as facilitating that conversation. Effective journalism will amplify a community’s questions about how well it’s doing and help find answers.
Once, journalism was defined by its medium—radio, television, print, the Web. The medium still matters—we need to understand how different forms of journalism shape information and serve communities—but today, the forms matter less than journalism’s effects. The new journalists will ask not just what should appear in tonight’s broadcast or tomorrow’s newspaper, but how their work is advancing the discussion.
We used to think of our society as a mass audience—a body of people all watching Walter Cronkite at the same time. We now confront a network of overlapping communities and conversations, and journalism must find the patterns that connect those diverse points of view.
Journalism becomes the story of how a society optimizes itself. It creates an ever-evolving record of how the society is functioning, so citizens can amplify their successes, improve their inefficiencies, and fix their mistakes. Once thought of as “the first draft of history,” journalism drafts the blueprint for an ever-changing present. It brings together the best information we have to evaluate our choices and adjust our course.
This is the place journalism holds in the new liberal arts: It is the art of the now.
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