I have to agree with Jeff Jarvis’ characterization of Nicholas Lemann’s New Yorker article about internet journalism, that it posits an invented and false antagonism between established mainstream journalists and the up-and-coming world of bloggers and internet, or citizen, journalists. Both have their own functions that should be seen as complementary; together, they have the power to strengthen the field of journalism as we know it. Jarvis calls this working in tandem “networked journalism”.
Internet journalists have a few roles to play in the journalistic landscape of today; for starters, they have a unique capacity, that even Lemann acknowledges, to provide raw material, sheer information. To make sense of this may require an especially savvy reader, or it may require a Journalist to put it into context through extra research and alaysis. (Anyway, as Jarvis challenges, “show me the millions of Technorati links claiming that we [bloggers] will fill your newsrooms.”) Bloggers also have the capacity to directly engage media in a conversation that previously wasn’t so open. With the advent and ease of the blog, ordinary citizens can interact with, and challenge, mainstream media (not to mention the government) in a way that was before impossible beyond a letter to the editor, that may or not be read and/or printed; in this way, they have the ability to function as a check on mainstream journalism, and it also gives the ordinary citizen more power to have a role in setting the agenda. Though Lemann would call me too “media-centric”, these days we have an all too timid press that, in cooperation with the government, is able to determine the national conversation. We now have the potential for news made by people.
Lemann, however, in the aforelinked-to article, identifies a disparity between the lofty ideals of internet journalism and the actual, often prosaic practice of it. As Jarvis notes, this is a bit of a strawman, and unfair as dull counterexamples from mainstream media could be conjured up for the dull examples Lemann draws from the net. But even taking him at face value, Lemann is wrong to use the dreary examples he scrounges up as disparaging, as though by nothing that the ‘net may not yet be functioning to its full potential–the potential for limitless, democratic freedom–that he’s shown it up as a fraud. He’s merely described the inchoate stages of a nascent movement.
Lemann’s thoughts on internet journalism might best be summed up looking at a page on The Guardian’s website in which he responds to Jeff Jarvis. At the bottom it reads, “comments have now been closed on this entry.”
