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I probably should have posted this sooner, since the registration deadline for the School of Journalism's International Symposium on Online Journalism is tomorrow. Dan Gillmor will be speaking at the keynote session Friday, which may draw a mess of blog types to the conference. I'm planning to check out a few of the panels in addtion to the keynote.

And to further clear out my backlog (backblog?) of items to post, here's a thought-provoking article from The San Antonio Current published in anticipation of the conference. On one hand, I'm posting it for sheer ego-stroking; the article asks "with an endowed Knight Chair in Journalism, and a renowned Radio, Television, and Film department, as well, it seems like a good place to look for the answer to the question, Can this profession be saved?"

Its always nice to hear that your program is "renowned," but the article's discussion of "alternative media" or what Clemencia Rodriguez calls "citizen media" gave me some surprises. The article has a pullquote from Bob Jensen, an outspoken activist professor in the J-School, that I didn't expect to see, "A lot of what's called indie media is not journalism. Journalism is an attempt by people who are independent of other institutions to understand and explain the world to people." Since Jensen is such an advocate of radical/progressive movements, this seemed uncharacteristically dismissive of grassroots media projects. One one hand, I would agree with him that "citizen's media" is not journalism, but I would contend that the institutional legitimization of a news organization largely makes journalism journalism. Since most news organizations (at least in the US) are supported by advertising dollars and are influenced by this industrial reality, I'm suspicious of how independent any media-maker can be.

I might conceptualize journalism in the context of the infogeek concept of the "reputation economy," where an earned or instutional reputation can give an individual's voice a degree of credibility in the culture. For example, I.F. Stone is regarded as a hero to many journalists and, today, most would regard him as a journalist. Yet, he self-published his newspaper worked from a particular subjectivity, so he wouldn't have cultural force of a newspaper to make his news "news." It was the reputation he earned (admittedly partially through some reporting for major newspapers) that gave him the credibility to reach an audience and affect their understanding of the world.

To return to Jensen's quote, I do wonder to what extent, the reporter used quotes that reassert the role of conventional journalism in our culture. As Barbie Zelizer points out in Covering the Body, much of the meaning-making journalists engage in is reasserting the cultural role of the journalist as objective expert.