That month’s Carnival of Journalism asked what could be done to increase the number of news sources in a community, drawing on the Knight Foundation’s 15 recommendations on the news and information needs of communities.
The obvious answer for a journalism school is to put students on the city, which the UBC Graduate School of Journalism did, as did many others. That fills part of the gap left by shrinking newsrooms. But the framing was doubtful: more acts of journalism were being performed by more people than ever, so supply was not the constraint. What Clay Shirky called filter failure was.
That moves the task from producing more to helping a community navigate what is already networked across it. Andy Carvin’s work at NPR on the protests in Tunisia and Egypt was the demonstration: a journalistic lens applied to curating social media flows as they arrived.
The underlying claim, argued at more length in a paper of the period, was that journalism had become ambient. “Journalism, which was once difficult and expensive to produce, today surrounds us like the air we breathe,” it ran. “Much of it is, literally, ambient, and being produced by professionals and citizens. The challenge going forward is helping the public negotiate and regulate this flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection, transmission and understanding of news.”
The suggestion that followed was that journalism schools could act as news hubs for their own communities, curating those flows as well as adding to them and experimenting with ways of helping people find the news they need.