March 12, 2004, 2.15pm • 159 comments » • 2,611 Views

Making the News

San Jose Mercury columnist Dan Gillmor is hard at work on his new book, Making The News.

It will “will explore the intersection of technology and journalism” and is itself an exercise in engaging his notion of the “former audience” - the news consumers who also become news producers thanks to the conversational synergy afforded by bottom-up new media.

To that end, Gillmore is publishing in-progress chunks of his book online and asking for feedback; he’s just popped up with the first chapter’s first draft. Some initial thoughts…

People who understood the value of online networks were the grateful beneficiaries of another kind of reporting during those appalling hours and days [of September 11]

Seems fair enough. News of the WTC attacks first spread from TV news, but, for office workers without televisions, e-mail and instant messaging got the message out far quicker and with more humanity. People were e-mailing each other asking for information about missing friends and relatives, Manhattanites were strolling around with digital cameras and camera phones, posting their own perspective to the web. Big news sites played forum to dazed, disorientated victims as well as sympathetic global citizens from the other side of the world. This was news event as mass exercise in information prospecting, publishing and conversation.

The creation of Big Media is something of an historical artifact. Freedom of the press was for those people who owned a press, reflecting financial reality.

Absolutely. The historical divide between news producers and news consumers was so because it was too expensive for the ordinary man in the street to publish either his own opinion or his own news.

But modern talk radio had another crucial feature: the participation of the audience. People, regular people, were invited to have their say on the radio. Before that, regular people had no immediate or certain outlet for their own stories and views short of letters to the editor in newspapers.

I think talk radio is all too often overlooked in the contextual history of participatory media, or even media in general. Whilst the UK does not enjoy as much talk radio as the US, the medium is of its time and yet was very ahead of its time. It’s interesting to see how BBC Five Live is evolving into a news and sport channel driven by talk, e-mail, voting and online participation. This week’s new TV trailers for the station reinforce this - ordinary people having their say on the big issues of the day, be that speed cameras or footballers’ wages.

Wahey! Good ‘ol Marshall McLuhan rears his saintly head, quoted by Gillmore:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding.

Today, the “central nervous system” of connected human beings is one which sees news coming from the ground up, pinging between consumers at light speeds all around the world. We know each other quicker, better and more intimately.

I’ve always agreed with Gillmor’s claim that readers know more than us journalists. That, of course, sends pangs of panic rattling through journalists’ ego centres. Preparing a presentation I was giving on online news to a group of new media bosses, my editor told jolted: “Don’t tell them that!” But, if it wasn’t the case that people who didn’t work for news organisations knew more valuable information than we do, the art of the interview would be dead - there would be no point speaking to anyone; we’d know it all already. “We media” and the “former audience” recontextualise journalism as it really is - trusted brands which dig the information mere mortals, with their limited access to the public sphere, can’t find, and reliable directors, re-users of public opinion.

This first chapter is so utterly tantalising and holds much promise for Dan’s book, which looks like becoming the authoritative source on the particpatory news revolution.