Interviewed by Jeffrey Inaba and Talene Montgomery

How do journalists decide how to tell stories? What are their responsibilities when reporting a story? And to what extent do they write in the public’s interest? New York University journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen discusses these issues in the context of the long-standing debate about whether journalists represent or create the public. ‘The public is there to be informed and it’s something we have to bring to life’, says Rosen. Adding to this debate is the advent of citizen journalism and in particular the role of the public in formulating the news story. Rosen guides Volume through the landscape of traditional journalistic methodologies, pinpointing the ramifications of new models of journalism on the stories told.

Jeffrey Inaba: In your article, ‘What Are Journalists For’, you describe the fragility of the public. You seem to be suggesting that it is by no means a stable entity and thus by extension ‘public interest’ is a mushy term. Can you describe the role of the press in defining the ‘public’?

Jay Rosen: This goes back to a debate that Walter Lippmann and John Dewey had about the nature of the public and whether we just represent it or do we also have to create it? Lipmann’s argument was: If you look at the public you’ll see it has very limited capacity. It can say yes or no, it can throw politicians in or out, but ultimately its perceptions are manipulated and that’s inevitable because the public is doing other things. He was trying to be a realist about it. Dewey said, ‘You know, I can’t disagree with you Walter. I see that, but you’re overlooking something. We have more and better tools than ever to bring the public alive and surely this is what we’re supposed to be doing. So you, Walter, and me, and all the other people involved in arts, culture, education and politics, have to figure out continually how to bring the public alive.’ It’s not just a question of information either, its also one of art. Because engaging people successfully is a social problem we have to figure out. So to me, yes, the public is there to be informed and it is something we have to bring to life. There’s no objective way of doing it; it’s an art and a commitment. I think really good journalists who care about telling the truth, who care about their stories and about having an effect are really saying, ‘I’m going to awaken the public’. And that’s what Dewey meant.

JI: So you are saying that the press has a public responsibility. How does that play out in the telling of the story, in the reporting of facts and events? Does this responsibility imply that journalists report comprehensively and impartially with the aim of informing the public or does there need to be a degree of interpretation as to just what the public’s interest is and to construct the story accordingly?

JR: Journalists have a responsibility to tell us what’s going on and tell us the truth and that does require impartiality. We know this from our normal lives. It doesn’t require you to be a journalist. If you went to a contentious meeting – and other people who also have a stake in what you have witnessed couldn’t go and they ask you what went on – you have a responsibility to report to the other people accurately and impartially. Yet you have other responsibilities too. People want to know not just what occurred, but also how they can affect things. Their participation and their power to affect the situation has something to do with their interest in information and there’s a vital connection between those two things.

Also, there are normal political situations in which values conflict, where the press doesn’t have to take any particular side because the situation is well represented. Yet there are lots of other situations in which if you just let the existing players play, lots of things aren’t going to get represented. So the press obviously has a duty to do that. And there are other exceptional circumstances in which the powerful players themselves have an interest in tearing down the accumulation of facts in order to present the truth as untrue. When that happens, journalists have a duty to be involved – I would say this in much stronger terms than they would – to reverse that behavior or penalize people for trying to do it.

Talene Montgomery: What is Citizen Journalism?

JR: The great press critic AJ Liebling once famously said about freedom of the press, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one’. And blogging means anyone can own one. That is a switch and ‘citizen journalism’ is simply a name for this fact. People have the tools and therefore they also have the powers of the press. Citizen journalism is when ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’ pick up these tools and use them to inform one another. Now, what does that means for the profession? Will they replace the press? That’s a whole other thing.

TM: What is the prevailing argument about professional journalism compared to citizen journalism? And what is your take on it?

JR: Well, we shouldn’t see them as opponents that meet and struggle. That is pure fiction. It has almost no accuracy in terms of what’s actually going on. But I would say the important issues are the following.

First: we need verified information. The most important reason for having professional journalism is it represents a verification system we otherwise would not have. The essence of what they do is not just that they report stuff, but that they report stuff that’s verifiable.

Second: there are some kinds of stories – investigative journalism, for example – that you can only get if somebody is working on them full-time. Finding out facts requires somebody working on it. That argues for professional journalism. There’s a whole class of things for which that is true.

Third: we need people with power, including and especially people in government, to provide access to the public itself. But it’s not practical for them to provide access to the public at large, so we need representative figures to pose questions. And obviously that, in a practical way, argues for people who have that access, because certain stories can only be gotten that way!

Certain stories need access, certain stories need someone working on them full-time and we need to verify. So all of those things are at risk and insofar as professional journalists are saying ‘Wait a minute, we can’t lose those things’ – I totally agree. I’m on their side. I’m in their camp.

What’s good about citizen journalism? Well, there is tons citizen journalism can’t do. At least 50% of the arguments that journalists want me to have with them engage in the proposition that citizen journalists can’t replace what ‘we’ do. Well, no! It’s a completely different activity. That’s like saying – and this is borrowed from another writer – that farmers’ markets can’t replace restaurants. Just because people are going to the farmers’ market doesn’t mean they aren’t going to go to a restaurant. They’re going for a totally different reason. That’s what I mean when I say they don’t overlap or compete.

So what is citizen journalism good at? We don’t necessarily know entirely yet, because we haven’t built good structures for it. But one of the things that it’s good at – which really comes from blogging – is that having people who really care about issues guide you to news about those issues is actually a better way of learning about them than depending on, say, the LA Times. What’s great about citizen journalism is that it is born from participation and it is created for your participation. The bloggers have been the ones – like amateurs in other new arts – who have actually pushed the craft forward. They’re the ones who learned to write with links; they’re the ones who learned to take the freedoms of the web – which are vast – and bring enough discipline to them through forms that make blogging intelligible.

JI: You’ve discussed a hybrid form of journalism. Can you talk about that?

JR: I’m interested in this thing people are calling Pro-Am journalism. [1] Ultimately the strongest forms and the best discoveries will be made with ‘pro’ journalists working with networks of amateurs, connected through smart web tools and applications and motivated to produce new information.

[1] For more on Pro-Am journalism, see Rosen’s site, New Assignment