Making sense of the new news

As more people use news that comes from open sources such as blogs and indy websites, Stephen Coleman says the established suppliers need to adopt a more sophisticated approach to feedback and interactivity to help the spread of media literacy

Columbia University’s project for excellence in journalism has declared that ‘Journalism is in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television.’ Both the producers and receivers of news are going to have to adapt.

According to a 2005 Carnegie survey, the internet is the most frequently cited source of news for 18-34 year-old Americans. Forty-four percent use online news portals at least once a day, compared with 37 percent who watch local tv news and 16 percent who watch national network news on a daily basis. In the 2005 UK election 71 percent of 18-25 year-old British internet users visited the BBC election website and only 20 percent said that they did not visit any election-related websites.
Online news-seekers are currently gravitating towards sites run by newspapers and broadcasters with established reputations. Of the 12 most popular news websites in the US, eight were trusted news publishers and the other four were run by internet service providers or search engines. In the UK, the BBC and The Guardian have been spectacularly successful in adapting to online formats, although all old media organisations face an inevitable tension between intellectual property rights (owning their stories) and the open-source ethos of content-sharing.

But established media organisations are under growing pressure from open-source news sites which have abandoned top-down editorial control for a more participatory style of journalism. The Indymedia network was established as a response to the failure of traditional media to cover the anti-globalisation protests on the streets of Seattle in 1999. A web-based global network of reporters and photographers was set up, designed as ‘an interactive platform for reports from the struggles for a world based on freedom, co-operation, justice and solidarity, and against environmental degradation, neoliberal exploitation, racism and patriarchy’.

There are now 160 Independent Media Centres on six continents, the largest alternative media service in the world. According to one of its leading activists, ‘Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it appear in the pool of stories publicly available… Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved.’

Another big success, Ohmynews, emerged out of the fierce South Korean electoral contest of 2002. It is a grass-roots news service by 30,000 citizen-reporters who between them submit about 200 articles each day. The editorial objective of Ohmynews is to create ‘a two-way journalism’ in which ‘the readers are no longer passive. They can be reporters anytime they want’.

Key to the success of both of these new news services has been a democratic notion of accountability, based upon the participatory production of news, with minimal and transparent editorial control. This conflicts with claims of professional journalism to possess exclusive expertise and adhere to rigorous ethical standards.

Making sense of the new news calls for new forms of literacy. Sorting through the vast mass of news and interpretations, now available to fragmented audiences across diverse platforms and channels, presents citizens with demanding challenges. First, in a world of information abundance, how can you know where to find what you want and need to know? This calls for metadata tools which allow people to search for themes and perspectives. Tools such as rich site summary (RSS) are used to retrieve updated material from the web. Services such as Technorati and Blogdex provide accounts of the main themes being discussed in blogs, so that anyone can focus on issues that concern them.

This capacity for personalised news aggregation gives rise to a second problem: the tendency for public opinion to polarise around clusters of prejudice which are reinforced by news sources designed to nurture them. If we only ever choose to encounter news and views produced by people who share our prejudices, there will be an inevitable intellectual retreat into self-selected information ghettos. How, in a world where you are free to choose your own news agenda, can you find out what you might not want to know, but probably need to know?

In my own research, I have been exploring ways that a coherent notion of democratic citizenship can be developed in the new news environment. I think it can, but only if as much attention is paid to literacies of media use as to standards of media production. Two conspicuous trends need to be addressed.

First, there is a pervasive public scepticism towards institutional authority. People are more inclined to trust their own experience than knowledge handed down from on high. A new conception of media literacy needs to support media users as they engage with a vast range of experiential narratives, from blogs to phone-ins to reality tv shows to daytime talk shows. People need to know how to make sense of these narratives; what they tell us about everyday citizenship; and what the opportunities and risks might be of participating in such media.

Being able to deconstruct interviews on Newsnight is one element of media literacy, but for many more people the key challenges concern how to confront negative stereotypes in soap operas or how to confront casual racism when it occurs on interactive reality tv shows. Media-literate citizens need to be able to find out who makes decisions about what is and isn’t acceptable in these contexts; how they might complain effectively when confronted with media insensitivity; and how to collaborate with others – perhaps through online protests of the kind that raised the alarm about recent events in Celebrity Big Brother – if no obvious channels seem to exist for them to articulate, register and debate their concerns.

The second trend which must be recognised, if media literacy is to be more than a pious ambition, is that most people have a low level of political efficacy: they don’t believe they can do much to influence the world around them.

Media interactivity might be adding to that frustration, for there is nothing worse than having access to feedback technology, but being surrounded by institutions that are not used to conversational communication. Both broadcasters and citizens need to be encouraged to think creatively and honestly about what they want from interactivity.

Potentially, innovations in interactive media could boost political efficacy and thereby reinvigorate democracy, but the rules of engagement need to be meaningful, transparent and consequential. For example, making interactivity more meaningful might entail a greater degree of editorial as well as simply authorial co-production, along the lines of Ohmynews. More consequential interactivity might entail going beyond the one-off ‘have your say’ approach to citizen-participation (which can sometimes turn into a space for ranters) towards a more structured, deliberative approach to thinking through issues, involving citizens, experts and policy-makers.

Defining and facilitating the new approaches to media literacy is a task that the BBC, as our national public service broadcaster, should embrace with enthusiasm. It’s a changing world out there – and we’re all out there.
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Stephen Coleman is professor of political communication, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds

Romeltea Media

Information Technology & World News Updated at: 2:11 AM