Thought Experiment: New Journalism Division of Labor
It's widely understood and celebrated that the categories "journalist" and "blogger" are insufficient to capture the richness and opportunity—really, the once-in-five-centuries revolution—that electronic media bring to civic discourse and investigation of people in power (including journalists and bloggers). After this year's Science Online conference, I started wondering, though, how can we think about divisions of labor within a new media environment that so frequently has all the discernible sub-structures of a bowl of soup? For efficiency, I am condensing the words "journalist" and "blogger" into "jogger."
Last night I was thinking about all this in response to this blog entry. I grant the traditional blogger (!) community everything, but can not abide glib, un-rigorous dismissals of traditional and computer-assisted reporting and investigative skills. (Last year I started writing a monograph on this topic but never finished it — because I had no externally imposed deadline!)
Here are some first-draft of scenarios. What should a jogger do in each circumstance? Should all joggers be able to respond productively to each of these situations? Should all joggers just know who is able to respond productively to each of these situations? The answers to these scenarios—who would do what in the new media environment—are the ones that keep me up at night. For each scenario, this is all you have to go on:
Last night I was thinking about all this in response to this blog entry. I grant the traditional blogger (!) community everything, but can not abide glib, un-rigorous dismissals of traditional and computer-assisted reporting and investigative skills. (Last year I started writing a monograph on this topic but never finished it — because I had no externally imposed deadline!)
I started trying to come up with questions the answers to which might represent a comprehensive-but-incomplete list of who-does-what work in the new investigative media. It's a list of scenarios that emphasizes the importance of investigation of primary sources as the heart of a democracy's watchdog functions. It shows my own bias toward shoe-leather and sharp pencils, and likely my own ignorance of how far this conversation has traveled. What scenarios along these lines should be considered? We are building a functional, benign panoption here, in which every part of the public civil, private, and communication leadership has a watchdog.
Here are some first-draft of scenarios. What should a jogger do in each circumstance? Should all joggers be able to respond productively to each of these situations? Should all joggers just know who is able to respond productively to each of these situations? The answers to these scenarios—who would do what in the new media environment—are the ones that keep me up at night. For each scenario, this is all you have to go on:
* An anonymous person sends you a hotel room key and asks you to use it at a certain time. You go, because you have no sense of danger and this is as close as you get to being in a spy novel. In the room you will find on the bed a clear facsimile of an official-looking classified document, seeming to bear the president's signature, that authorizes the use of waterboarding and other torture against U.S. citizens in extremist groups. You must verify, and if it's real, contextualize it.How might these situations be probed in our new environment? What am I leaving out? Is this idiotic? The way I like to work, exemplified by the total failure of this blog, I'll almost certainly regret posting this without spending a month figuring out if I've got the right idea.
* Someone in government whom you know tells you he or she has seen this document but doesn't have it.
* Someone in government whom you know tells you he or she believes this document exists, but hasn't seen it.
* A pattern of allegations from individuals affiliated with extremist groups suggests they are targets of a pressure campaign organized by a government agency.
* Digital local police arrest records from 17 states, digitized and assembled in one database, show simultaneous movement against individuals affiliated with extremist groups that can't immediately be dismissed as coincidence.
* The Senate Majority Leader, who is not from the president's political party, accuses the White House of gross legal violations against U.S. citizens in the name of anti-terrorism. This becomes a talking point among opposition political leaders and their media and is denied by the president's party. No specifics are coming to light.
* There is no evidence or allegations of anything, but you just were just wondering about the theme of domestic terrorism suspects and trying to find something interesting to do on weekends.
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