Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Be it: “So Much for the Information Age”

Published on 11/04/08
by Zac Echola

Ted Gup writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I teach a seminar called “Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge.” I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word “rendition.”

Not one hand went up.

…

As a journalist, professor, and citizen, I find it profoundly discouraging to encounter such ignorance of critical issues. But it would be both unfair and inaccurate to hold those young people accountable for the moral and legal morass we now find ourselves in as a nation. They are earnest, readily educable, and, when informed, impassioned.

…

Then, too, there is the explosion of citizen journalism. An army of average Joes, equipped with cellphones, laptops, and video cameras, has commandeered our news media. The mantra of “We want to hear from you!” is all the rage, from CNN to NPR; but, although invigorating and democratizing, it has failed to supplant the provision of essential facts, generating more heat than light. Many of my students can report on the latest travails of celebrities or the sexual follies of politicos, and can be forgiven for thinking that such matters dominate the news — they do. Even those students whose home pages open onto news sites have tailored them to parochial interests — sports, entertainment, weather — that are a pale substitute for the scope and sweep of a good front page…

Obviously, I’m not so critical of technology, because it is only a tool and can go either way. But I question a few of the premises in the piece.

How can we add good context to news pieces? Do a Google News search for “Iraq.” Where do you even begin to understand the complexity of the past five years? It’s like trying to watch LOST in the middle of this season. Without that background information most of this information is useless. Click on most any story at Google News and you can’t continue to dig for more information about the subject, nearly every page is a dead end; You just get one article about one small piece of the larger picture. It’s incredibly disappointing. On the Web, we should always strive to leave a trail of bread crumbs with relevant links.

Compare news sites to Wikipedia where I can click for hours.

How can we make important information relevant to people that may not normally seek this kind of information out? Too often I feel like this industry throws dry but important information out there without linking it to real human concerns. People aren’t usually one trick ponies. They care about many different topics, some run parallel and some topics cross paths. We should find angles where multiple topics meet, wedge information about one important topic into the conversation about another. And make it relevant!

Citizen journalism and the “We want to hear from you!” aspect of it is kind of silly as an idea. But to assume that because people with cell phone cameras and such can’t commit acts of journalism is folly. This gets back to the broader picture. Gathering information people in our community collect, placed in a thoughtful, relevant context, only adds to the value of our own reporting. Obviously there is a lot of noise out there, but we should strive to act as the filter, to get to the signal that matters.

Just look through some of these photos from the N.D. Democratic convention to get an idea of what acts of journalism people in our communities are doing.

All of this feeds off itself. Broader context through citizen journalism adds more bread crumbs and helps humanize news. Continuity of the overall picture helps target news items to the right group(s) of people. Well informed people can provide more (and better) acts of journalism.

The end. Or is it?

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