The theme of that year’s AEJMC conference was transformation, and a paper by David Ryfe and Donica Mensing of the University of Nevada in Reno put a specific version of it: that the purpose of journalism, not only its tools, might be shifting — away from transmitting information and towards participation.
Their historical frame was two earlier shifts. In the 1830s journalism moved from affiliation to association, largely with political parties; in the 1890s it moved from association to information, organised around telling citizens about the world around them. That third settlement is the one working journalists still describe when asked what the job is for.
To test whether it was moving again, Ryfe and Mensing looked at what citizen journalism sites said they were doing. Most still claimed the transmission role, defining themselves as suppliers of information to a local community. Alongside it, though, the US sites in the sample placed a premium on conversation and discussion, and treated their users as producers rather than as an audience. The researchers read that as a different theory of how a person becomes informed: not by consuming information, but by interacting with others around it.
Where the argument gets thin is what the word participation covers. For most news organisations it meant comments — participation bolted to the end of the process, once the journalism was finished. Involving people in story selection, reporting and publication is the version that would change the product, and in 2008 it was mostly the citizen sites attempting it.