October 12, 2004, 10.49pm • 12 comments » • 3,086 Views

Balancing act

E-media Tidbits throws up a piece about efforts at the University of Missouri’s journalism school to create a citizen journalism site, following GoSkokie:-

MyMissourian.com gives voice to the people … On this Web site residents may write their own stories about life in their communities.  Student editors from the Missouri School of Journalism will guide the writers by suggesting topics and fine-tuning their writing – but will rely on those usually termed “readers” to become “reporters”.

Which raises an interesting dichotomy for journalism education. Do students go to journalism school to learn how to be journalists or how to train citizen-journalists?

There is perhaps an interesting tension in journalism schools between actually teaching someone how to become a reporter and where the emerging journalism fits in.

Someone of the older-school end of journalism would likely believe the role of journalism education is to equip a paying student to be a reporter in the traditional mould.

The tentative online options at journalism schools, in my experience, have, until now, seemed to centre on moving this traditional journalism online as shovelware and, later, making the most of fancier presentation options (both valid training avenues for the way online journalism is configured on the ground at the moment). All the while, the authority at the powerful end of the production process is left in tact.

Recent online projects like MyMissourian.com would seem to make students “editors” before they are “reporters”. Incidentally, the stories carried aren’t earth-shaking; they’re the kind of fare you might find in a local newspaper. Is the aim here to deal with taking content from the public in that kind of environment, whether that be in print or online, and developing planning and gatekeeping skills? How is it complemented by the traditional training?

Clearly, the big future vision for online journalism at the moment is participation and grassroots production, all of which means the skills of the journalist morph to encompass moderation; the journalist becomes a gatekeeper in more ways than one. But I’m just curious as to how the balance is being struck between these new skills and those needed to find work at, say, a newspaper, a TV network or (and how many of these are there?) a website that does original reporting.