In fourth grade science class, I learned that taste buds were divided into regions of the tongue. We even conducted a confusing failed “experiment” in which we were supposed to confirm this with taste strips. Year later, in junior year biology, I learned that this experiment failed because taste buds are, in fact, distributed across the mouth. This taught me that textbooks are insufficient for teaching us the science by which we should live.

The alternative, unfortunately, is a volatile scientific understanding that comes from sources of questionable trustworthiness. One day, we read that coffee is bad for health because it increases blood cortisol levels. A few weeks later, we read that coffee is, in fact, good for health because it is correlated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s. Most of us do not read the journal articles or talk to the experts. We are left to throw up our hands and browse Reddit instead, resuming our previous aggressive coffee consumption habits.

Branding motivations play a major role of knowledge obfuscation. It is well known that pharmaceutical companies and tech companies try to skew public understanding to increase consumption. There is also another, more insidious branding at work: that of researchers trying to increase their influence. Even the most scrupulous researchers are susceptible to branding pressure: mainstream acceptance is influential in faculty hiring and tenure cases. As a Ph.D. student in computer science, I have learned not to tell you why the ideas I propose may never work. If I am lucky enough to get that media interview, I am not going to say why my problem is not the most important problem or why my solution is not the best solution. Because of the public’s short attention span, presenting catchy sound bytes and oversimplified explanations is good for both my interviewer and me. No wonder the science we get from the New York Times, TED talks, and blog posts is so fragmented and inconsistent.

My aspiration for journalism, then, is for journalists to provide context and curation for scientific knowledge. Journalism can publicize not just results but potential motivations, from funding sources to a scientist’s track record of stances on a topic. Rather than presenting stories in a one-sided way, journalists can solicit multiple expert opinions, including experts outside the area who may not have as much reputation and political capital at stake. Rather than pander to public desire for simple panaceas, journalists can teach the public to embrace complexity by giving people tools to help engage with conflicting opinions. The newest research on whether coffee is good for us may be different than what we heard last week, but if we know how this compares with the whole research trajectory on the topic, as well as expert opinions on the validity of the research, we are able to form educated opinions. It is only with this context and curation that non-experts can have any hope at navigating this science branding game.

by ChicagoPublicMedia (CC Flickr)

Figuring out what a journalist’s role ought to be leads me to ask this: What makes her work valuable (if it’s valuable at all) to society, and is that value aligned/misaligned with larger societal goals? Rosenstiel writes that a journalist ought to “provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.” This seems true, given that we want to be free and self-governing (i.e. a democracy). But if providing information is the whole story, journalists can be replaced by automated data visualization tools. There’s software that can even contextualize financial and sports data. No journalist needed.

But providing information is only part of the story. I think that we also value communities. And although Rosenstiel writes that a journalist’s providing information becomes “the basis for creating community, making human connections”, he doesn’t say how that happens. I would go one step further than Rosenstiel and argue that a journalist’s role is not just to provide information, but to help form communities. What does that mean? By filtering and presenting information via narratives, good journalists can make abstract concepts and distant events relatable. If the story is compelling enough, they can extend the circle of people, events and ideas that readers care about. And that’s a pretty unique and meaningful position to be in. Unlike a novelist who connects readers to characters in history or the imagination, unlike a data scientist who connects audiences to facts, unlike a blog writer who shares opinions, the journalist contextualizes facts in new and interesting ways. She forms a connective tissue out of seemingly disparate parts.

The greatest example of informative, engaging and community-driven journalism that I’ve recently seen is WBEZ’s Curious City. The project features an online platform on which listeners can pose questions and then vote on them. The questions are then assigned to a team of reporters. The reporters first talk to the “curious citizen” to find out which facets of the question they’re more interested in. Sometimes, they take the community member on reporting trips and post reporting updates in real time. To come up with the most satisfying explanation, reporters talk to experts, post interactive maps, timelines and other types of media. For example, in a story in which a listener asked “Where does our unmistakable and loveable Chicago accent come from?”, reporters teamed up with George Mason University linguist Corrine McCarthy. McCarthy wrote a script that’s supposed to draw out stereotypically Chicago sounds from people who read it. Then, listeners (361 of them) called in and WBEZ collected voicemail recordings of the passage they read. McCarthy wrote a listening guide for reporters who then evaluated the recordings and created visuals, text and listening tracks to summarize their findings.

In another story sparked by the question “What can you get in Chicago that you can’t from any other place?”, the Curious City team turned to Facebook and Twitter for input, made a list of the community’s “report” and then taped a Chicago musician to make a song out of the most credible suggestions, which they then posted on the site.

Jennifer Brandel, a lead Curious City producer, says that the project aims to flip the power structure of radio. Rather than an assignment editor choosing a story, listeners choose which story they’re most interested in. This defies the idea of radio as a one-way medium. It turns reporting into a community project. Here, the reporter’s job is not to simply provide information, but to connect community members with experts, with each other, with ideas.

This model for a reporter as a “connector” of community members’ questions, expert knowledge, and research seems much more satisfying to me than a reporter as simply a provider of information. Listeners are given agency by being involved in the question-asking, research and reporting process.

The future of news is tied directly to the future of how citizens are informed. This connection is confirmed by Starr and Kovach and Rosenstiel. I would go a step further and say that the news is connected to civic engagement and participation. This is increasingly true as participatory and social media provide a way for anyone to join the discussion of events and articles. I think this trend towards greater participation and engagement with the news is a good thing and should continue, but I also think there is a place for traditional media.

Participatory media alone has two opposite problems; either there is so much information on an subject that it is impossible to fully understand the discussion and topic itself or not enough people talk about and analyze a subject. I think traditional media serves two key roles to balance out a mostly participatory news ecosystem. First, traditional media synthesizes and distills the discussions in participatory media and projects this information to a broader audience. Second, traditional media serves as a guidepost for what topics are important for citizens to discuss and investigate.

The traditional media is still in an incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous role. If anything, it is more powerful than before as citizens intentionally or unintentionally base their own increasingly spread beliefs on what they hear in the traditional media. As a result, it needs to be handled carefully. One example of an issue highlighted by Kovach and Rosenstiel is the corporate influence of news. We need to develop ways of minimizing and disclosing these external influences if traditional media is to have its ideas spread throughout participatory media.

Just as participatory media is balanced by traditional, this issue with traditional media can be tempered by participatory media. In the early stages of a story, journalists can listen to the conversations in participatory media, understand them, and incorporate them in the story. We need to make this balancing cycle easier by developing tools and fostering collaboration between professional journalists and citizens.

Aaron Swartz proposed an interesting solution for the future of transparency and news. He suggested that journalists, bloggers, programmers, lobbyists, and people with all sorts of skills work together in investigative strike teams to understand and fix society’s problems. I think this is a great way for traditional and participatory media to benefit from each other in a way that results in not only increased access to information but also tangible improvements to the world.

I also think this is happening naturally in many ways. Leaking organizations are one example of this process. Many leaking organizations are independent institutions run by normal citizens who receive and verify information, find background and supplementary information, analyze documents, and work with traditional media partners to release and explain the information. At their best, leaking organizations work very much like Swartz’s investigative strike teams. We need to encourage investigative strike team-like partnerships, teach people how to make participatory media, and build structures to make it easier to get involved and understand all the information available. I have one specific proposal for doing that in leaking here.

In working on my response to Kovach and Rosenstiel’s The Elements of Journalism, I read a piece by Ann Marie Lipinski for Nieman Reports drawing parallels between Aaron Swartz and Eugene Patterson, who both happened to pass away around the same time last month. She discussed the comparison with Nicco Mele and recounted his observation concerning the state of the institution of newspapers: “One of the questions raised by the comparison is about the role of editors and journalists in our communities…. Eugene Patterson’s life makes it clear that newspapers were a crucial perch for true leadership—a disappearing perch. And I’m not sure we’ve got any institutions poised to fill that void…. Aaron was, in a sense, the spiritual heir to the crusading editor. How do we encourage more nerds to be like Aaron?”

Mele had earlier cited Swartz’s “moral suasion” as the characteristic which seems to align him with the high principle and high calibre journalist Patterson. This resonated with my current thinking on journalism, which has been to try and reduce journalism down to its basic elements, not unlike Kovach and Rosenstiel attempt to do. What I find is a set of principles and processes, traditionally embodied and practiced by the institutions of the newspaper and the profession, whose members we call journalists. However, I believe these institutions can be separated from the elements of journalism and reconstituted as a civic skill set, exemplified by Swartz at his best, which is to say the pursuit of knowledge, openness, and democracy through principled practice.
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