Over the past two decades, shifts in media technologies, corporate structure and the organization of public life have combined to change the practice of journalism. This course explores these shifts, with an eye to seeing how they affect journalism's role in society. At the same time, the class will introduce you to the techniques of journalism in digital media and offer you conceptual and practical tools with which to join the fray. By the end of the course, you should have a clear sense of the various ways journalists have taken up digital media and a sense of how you might use those media yourself. You should also gain a broad understanding of the ways in which recent social and economic developments have changed both the practices of journalists and the nature of the publics with whom they communicate. You will actively blog, wiki, RSS, tag, and podcast. Each class meeting will involve collaborative work in small teams, class discussions, hands-on work with participatory media, and brief lectures about the coming week's reading. On occasion, we'll have guests. Last year's guests included Craig "Craigslist" Newmark, citizen journalist (and author of one of our texts) Dan Gillmor, Ross Mayfield (founder of wiki company, Socialtext), Zack Rosen (creator of the group blog for the Howard Dean campaign), Creative Commons founder Professor Lawrence Lessig, and others
Readings (Textbooks):
Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2004
Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001.
Course Reader: Available at the Bookstore.
Academic Computing Resources at Stanford: While this course has a strong analytical character, direct experience with online publishing skills will require a basic familiarity with Stanford's resources for creating and posting materials to the web. These can be found online here
Part 1: The Technological, Social, and Institutional Contexts of Digital Journalism
1: Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Introductions: Where are we, where are we going?
Key Questions: Who are we and why are we in this class? Where is "news" in the digital environment? How do we characterize the present moment and the immediate future in regard to the practice of journalism? What can we do at Stanford in 2007 to advance journalism in the network age? Can we envision building a platform today for experimenting with tomorrow's journalism? What are our expectations for such a platform?
Lab: Introduction to blogging; introduction to the class wiki; create personal blogs and wiki pages.
In-Class Assignment: write notes on your personal wiki page about this class and your personal expectations for the course
2: Tuesday, January 16
What was journalism? What was "the public?" What are digital media? What are its publics?
• Robert Darnton, "Writing news and telling stories," Daedalus 104 Spring 1975: 175-197. (Reader)
• Pablo Bocszowski, Digitizing the News, Chapter 1. (Reader)
• Bruno Giussani, "A new media tells different stories." First Monday 2.4 (1999).(Also in reader)
Web Resources:
• Podcasting, Wikis and Blogs: Learning at the BBC
Key Questions: How are journalistic routines, industry structures, and technology related to journalism's public role? How are changes in technology, editorial philosophies, roles of producer and consumer of information, changing the nature of news and journalism?
Lab: Blogging and Wiki work, II: Divide into teams, begin to discuss how to distill best ideas for Cardinal Inquirer designs into well-designed wiki pages, working collaboratively for the rest of the quarter. Teams will present their work at the last class. RSS: setting up an aggregator. Tagging 1: Social bookmarking with del.icio.us
Part 2: Mass Journalism in Transition
3: Tuesday, January 23
When old journalism met new media
Readings:
• Philip E. Agre, "Find Your Voice: Writing For a Webzine" (AVAILABLE ONLINE ONLY)
• Amazoning The News (Reader) (see site too: http://www.hypergene.net/ideas/amazon./html)
• Timothy L. O'Brien, "The Newspaper of the Future," New York Times, June 26, 2005
• Bob Baker, "It just doesn't MATTER," Newsthinking.com, November 9, 2005
• Charles Cooper, "All the news that's fit to blog," News.com, November 11, 2005
• Chip Scanlan, "What is 'Narrative" Anyway?" Poynteronline, October 7, 2003 (Reader)
Web Resources:
• The elements of digital storytelling
• Center for Digital Storytelling web site
• see especially: http://www.storycenter.org/canada/storytelling.html
• WBEZ Chicago, “This American Life”
Key Questions: What kinds of news forms have emerged in the digital environment? How do they shift mass journalism's relationship to its audience? How can you "tell a story" in digital media?
Lab: Tagging II: Photo sharing with Flickr
4: Tuesday, January 30
The Emergence of Collaborative Citizen Journalism
Readings:
• Bernard Moon, " Open It Up, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle!"
• CommonTimes: A Community Driven Web News Site
• Yu, Yeon-Jung, "OhMyNews Makes Every Citizen a Reporter"
• Moore, James, "The Second Superpower Rears Its Beautiful Head"
Web Resources:
• Mediachannel
• Freedom Forum
• Jim Romenesko at Poynter
• Poynter
• Editor and Publisher
• Jeff Jarvis: BuzzMachine.com
• J.D. Lasica, "News That Comes to You," Online Journalism Review, January 23, 2003
• Jon Udell, "Tag Mania Sweeps the Web," Jon Udell, July 20, 2005
• Timo Hannay, "Tagging and Participative Journalism," You're It – a Blog on Tagging
Key Questions: What role do networks of individuals, think tanks and other intermediaries play in shaping the news? What news-shaping forces are emerging from search, tagging, blogging, and other Web-based media?
Lab: Podcasting 1: finding, downloading, listening to podcasts
Due: Critical Paper #1
5: Tuesday, February 6
"Personal" journalism: Pundits, Freelancers and Public Intellectuals
Readings:
• Dan Gillmor, We The Media, Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 12
• John Rockwell, "Conversing on the arts by clicking a mouse," New York Times, July 9, 2003 (Reader)
• "Journalism without Journalists"
Key Questions: What’s the difference between a blogger, a journalist, a pundit and an intellectual? Or is there one anymore?
Lab: Podcasting II: Recording and publishing podcasts
Part Three: New Publics, New Journalistic Forms:
6: Tuesday, February 13
Rethinking "The Public": The Origins and Nature of the Public Sphere
Readings:
• Nancy Fraser. “Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1991. 109-142. (Reader)
• David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, Pp 3-17 (Reader)
• Rosen, Jay, "The Action of the Idea," The Idea of Public Journalism, Theodore L. Glasser, ed., New York: Guilford, 1999, pp 21-48
Web resources:
• Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention
Key Questions: What are the relationships among publics, media, and democracy? What might the role of journalism be in a world of multiple publics?
Lab: Teams will work together on their wiki presentation for the last class.
7: Tuesday, February 20
The Public Sphere in The Internet Era
Readings:
• Michael Schudson, “Click here for democracy: a history and critique of an information-based model of citizenship.” Democracy and new media. Eds. Henry Jenkins, David Thorburn and Brad Seawell. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. 49-60.
• Philip E. Agre, “Growing a democratic culture: John Commons on the wiring of civil society.” Democracy and New Media. Eds. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 61-67.
• Pieter Boeder, "Habermas Heritage: the future of the public sphere in the network society," First Monday, volume 10, number 9 ( September 2005)
Web resources:
• MoveOn.Org
• Howard Dean’s Campaign Site
• City of Palo Alto
• Deliberative Polling
Key Questions: What kinds of "publics" are emerging in and around digital media? What kinds of power struggles erupted when broadcast channels were confronted by the emergence of many-to-many media? What role does online discourse play in the future of democracy – and what role does journalism play in digital debate and deliberation?
Lab: Roy Pea will introduce and demonstrate Diver
Due: Critical Paper #2
8: Tuesday, February 27
New Communities, New Routines: Early Alternatives
Readings:
• Nina Eliasoph, “Routines and the making of oppositional news.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.December (1988): 313-334.
• “Indymedia.org: A New Communications Commons” Dorothy Kidd in McCaughey, Martha, and Michael D. Ayers. Cyberactivism: online activism in theory and practice. New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 47-70.
• “Emerging Alternatives: Edging away from anarchy: Inside the Indymedia Collective,” Gal Beckerman, CJR 2003
Key Questions: How do the politics of community news producers, news routines and new technologies interact? What is the future, if any, for oppositional news?
Web Resources:
Lab: Video: Introduction to video online
9: Tuesday, March 6
Commons Based Peer Production and Open Source Journalism
• Yochai Benkler, 2006, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 1-34. (Reader)
• Gary Rivlin, “Leader of the Free World,” Wired 11.11 (November, 2003) (Reader)
• Thomas Goetz, “Open Source Everywhere,” Wired 11.11 (November, 2003) (Reader)
Key Questions: How are the dynamics of open source production processes affecting the ways journalists serve the public? How might social accounting technologies like eBay's or Slashdot's reputation systems shape the gathering, evaluation, dissemination, and analysis of news?
Guest: Fabrice Florin
10: Tuesday, March 13
The Intersection of Social, Technological, Institutional: Architecture as Politics
Readings:
• David Isenberg, The Rise of the Stupid Network, 1997
• Open Source Video on Net Neutrality
• Manuel Castells, "Why Networks Matter," Network Logic: Who Governs in an Interconnected World?, Helen McCarthy, Paul Miller, Paul Skidmore, eds, London: Demos, 2004, pp 221-224
• Kovac and Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism, pp. 9-110
• Elisia L. Cohen “Online journalism as market-driven journalism.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46.4 (2002).
• Robert McChesney “So much for the magic of technology and the free market: the world wide web and the corporate media system.” The world wide web and contemporary cultural theory. Eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. 5-36.
Web Resources:
• Architectural Principles of the Internet (ftp)
Key Questions: How are social processes being written into and performed by computer code? In what ways is the architecture of communication media a political matter? What are the implications of there phenomena for journalists? Given the new organizational, economic and discursive forms associated with network technologies, can journalists still serve a single public? If technology changes almost everything about the institutions and practices of journalism, what will remain unchanged? What should remain unchanged? How do financial pressures shape the potential of online journalism to serve the public? Do new media free us from the problems of media consolidation?
Student Presentations: The first hour of class will be devoted to discussion of this week's readings. The remainder of the class will consist of team presentations. Each of the teams that have been working together for the quarter will present the critical evaluation of existing university news sites and their plan for redesigning the Cardinal Inquirer, drawing upon the best ideas from the papers, blog entries, team bookmarks, created by the class during the quarter. Professors Grimes and Turner will join Professor Rheingold as respondents.