Written for a round of the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Carnival of Journalism project in March 2011, this argued that innovation in journalism had been reduced to product development, when the harder and more useful work was conceptual.
The shortage was never in new tools. It was in what is usually called a digital mindset: an understanding of how networked technologies, and the practices and social arrangements they enable, had changed the media environment. That leap is difficult in journalism specifically because study after study has found reporters’ thinking shaped by the norms of a profession that had been largely unchanged until recently.
The practical consequence was aimed at fellowship programmes. Any fellowship meant to help journalists thrive, the argument ran, should include a theoretical grounding in how the foundations of media are shifting — not more technologised ways of doing the same job, but the shift from publishing to participation, from broadcast to dialogue, from individual to collective intelligence, and from sole to collaborative authorship. Journalists inclined to shrug at media studies were exactly the audience being addressed. Underneath it sat a single reframing: journalism as a practice to be shared rather than a profession to be defended.