Rockchucks – Innovation Incubator

Ok…so most of my classes are not technology based, even though they realize that technology is what is driving this industry (media, journlaism). So my post might not have anything to do with helping us on our way to an idea, but it certainly might shed some light on the theoretical future of journalism. In my Mass Media & Political Communication class one of the instructors, who was a long time Wall Street Journal economic reporter, gave an interesting lecture on the implementation and rise of civic journalism. She defined civic journalism as an attempt to abandon the notion that citizens and journalists are merely spectators. Civic journalism, she asserted, believes that journalism has an obligation to the public to unload information that is in direct effect/affect with the community and that the way journalists perform their job has a direct impact on public life. In addition, civic journalism takes some of the agenda setting powers traditionally given to editors and puts it in the journalists hands a little more. She said she wasn’t quite sure she was on board with this whole “new” way of doing journalism, and wasn’t quite sure it was even ‘journalism,’ but that she was willing to give it a test run in the class room setting. It just so happens that this class is going to perform civic journalism.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I didn’t know there was really any other kind of journalism. I mean, I got into this whole game because I wanted to make a difference in society, but not with picket signs and rallies, more with words and facts . . .the Edward R. Murrow way. I wanted to inform society, community and make a better world. I don’t know what type of better world that would be, but I know that an informed society is a better one. Further more, I don’t know that I want to just throw facts and stories out there without any type of social conscience behind them. Is that even ethical? I know where this instructor is coming from, that unbiased reporting is the only way to accurately inform the public, but can you really live your life detached from emotional cause? Am I wrong in asserting that what we’ve been participating in all summer, and now into the fall semester is civic journalism? I was not aware that this was such a highly controversial topic. If I get nothing more out of this whole experience, I have definitely learned that the journalistic community is full of wedges and divides. But if that’s true, then how can we expect to bring people together with our craft?