Peggy: It's such a profoundly powerful and
strong conundrum. I got involved with journalists because my experience in
working organizations is that communication systems--the stories that we
tell--shape our worldview, and that shapes our behavior, and journalists are
cultural storytellers. My feeling was, that the stories that we were being
told, this was back in about '99; there was a shooting at a Jewish community
center that was racially motivated and--
Rob: The L.A. area if I recall.
Peggy: That's right. Yes, it was. And such shootings were a pretty
rare event at that point, and it got me thinking about this notion of
storytelling, and knowing that "You change the story, you change our
world." And so that's where my
commitment to working with journalists came from, and what I discovered was I
was stepping into it just as journalism as we know it, was really beginning
to--you know, it's been declining. Newspaper readership has been declining for
at least more than a generation, but it was really beginning to accelerate. And
I found myself asking the question, "What does it take to change a social
system?" and managed to hook-up, having decided to work with them--with an
editor who, at that point, was the incoming president of a news organization
Who asked the question, "What would it take to have a conversation about the
future of journalism?"
And what we have done--journalismthatmatters.org is our website. What we've done over the last ten years
has been convening conversations amongst the people who are re-imagining news
and information around questions that matter to them. And the feedback that
we've gotten through the years is that this is the only place where
conversations were taking place that were forward focused, that were about new
possibilities, rather than the " Woe is me," or "the industry is falling
apart," that has been taking place in most places. And the things that I'd say
that we're learning are things like, journalism is still about the public good
and it is now entrepreneurial. And we did a series these last two years called
"Create or Die ," that was really focused principally on journalists' color, because
mainstream journalism is about 85% Caucasian. And personally, I think part of
the reason that people have fallen away--generally, journalists blame it on the
changes and technology, and certainly that's been a factor. I personally think
it has more to do with content that doesn't relate to ordinary people and their
needs.
And when you look at the mismatch between the
racial makeup of mainstream journalism and the population at large, I think
that kind of "out of touch-ness" is part of it. So one of the "Ahas!" out of
these "Create or Die" gatherings has been the notion that communities need to
take responsibility for their own story, and one way of doing that is embedding
journalists in community.
I do think that the forms of journalism are
going to be ultimately as unrecognizable today--that we don't know what they are
yet. They'll look as different from TV and radio and even online news as those
looked to the way news was delivered before the printing press; that the
changes are that radical. And I say that in part, because of my metaphor was
something that we actually saw being explored at this "Create or Die"
gathering, which is the idea of investigative journalism being delivered
through hip hop, video games and comedy.
I mean, we know the new forms are going to be
very social, highly interactive. A
colleague of mine was part of creating or led the creation of something called wellcommons.com,
which is in Lawrence, Kansas. And this is a site about health and well being in
the community. And their goal was that at least 50% of the content be generated
by people in the community, and she, Jane Stevens, is the person who is the
thought leader behind creating this, and she's like this convert--very clear
that the interactions between the journalists and the community on the site are
what bring it to life, and that it is inherently a solutions-orientated site
the moment you have those kinds of interactions going on.
For me the big questions that I sit with around
it is, "How do we decide what stories get told," which oddly enough is not
something that seems to be a very explicit part of the training for a
journalist, and I think it's one of the crucial questions we can ask: "What are
the stories that are important to us? How do we decide?"
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