{"id":416,"date":"2008-02-15T04:19:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-15T11:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulgillin.com\/2008\/02\/gag-me-with-a-constitution.html"},"modified":"2008-02-15T04:19:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-15T11:19:00","slug":"gag-me-with-a-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/gag-me-with-a-constitution\/","title":{"rendered":"Gag me with a Constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared on my Newspaper Death Watch<\/a> blog, but I wanted to share:<\/span><\/p>\n

I got a call today from a journalist who\u2019s doing a story on the future of newspapers and he shared an interesting tidbit. He said he had contacted a prominent thought leader in the journalism field, whom I won\u2019t name. This thought leader had said that the impending collapse of the newspaper industry was \u201ca threat to democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Excuse me, but what? A threat to democracy? Newspapers are dying, in large part, because<\/i> of democracy. The rise of citizen publishing has made it possible, for the first time, for large numbers of ordinary citizens to publish to a global audience without the intercession of media institutions. What could be more democratic than that? If Thomas Jefferson was alive today, he\u2019d be an active blogger. Social media is the most democratic process to hit the publishing industry in 500 years.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to give the thought leader the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was referring to the decline of investigative journalism as practiced by newspapers. On that point, I\u2019ll defer to journalism professor Steve Boriss<\/a>, who argues that a lot of what passes for investigative journalism today is simply reporters acting as conduits for whistle-blowers. Those malcontents will find other outlets for their gripes, whether it be Consumerist.com<\/a> or something else. I\u2019m quite confident that the market will take care of filling the need for advocacy reporting.<\/p>\n

I think the threat-to-democracy statement is more a function of the arrogance of traditional news journalists, who believe that a system in which a few thousand editors decide what people should know is superior to one in which many millions of citizens make those same judgments. If citizen media is a threat to democracy, I shudder to think of the alternative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared on my Newspaper Death Watch blog, but I wanted to share: I got a call today from a journalist who\u2019s doing a story on the future of newspapers and he shared an interesting tidbit. He said … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[16,20],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pTy95-6I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}