The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism

This is adapted from a chapter I wrote for a collection, to be called Extreme Democracy: the Book, edited by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe for O'Reilly Books. Other authors include Adina Levin, Joi Ito, Ross Mayfield, Jim Moore, Howard Rheingold, Doc Searls, Clay Shirky, and Ethan Zuckerman.

“Journalism,” James W. Carey tells us, “takes its name from the French word for day. It is our day book, our collective diary, which records our common life.”

To record the events of the day is equally the aim of the newsroom and the diary writer. Carey, a press scholar who teaches at Columbia University, finds a connection at the soul between journalism and the practice of journal keeping. Both are trying to prevent events from disappearing without reflection, narration, and the means to look back. “That which goes unrecorded goes unpreserved except in the vanishing moment of our individual lives,” he writes.

When Carey speaks of journalism, he mean the practice of it. “Not the media. Not the news business. Not the newspaper or the magazine or the television station but the practice of journalism,” which exists independent of any media platform. He goes on:

There are media everywhere. Every despot creates his own system of media. There is a news business everywhere; there just isn’t all that much journalism, for there can be no journalism without the aspiration for or institutions of democratic life….

Just as medicine, for example, can be practiced in enormous clinics organized like corporations or in one-person offices, journalism can be practiced in multinational conglomerates or by isolated freelancers. Just as medicine can be practiced with technologies as advanced as magnetic image resonating machines or as primitive as an ear that hears complaints and an eye that observes symptoms, so journalism can be practiced with satellites or script. The practice does not depend on the technology or bureaucracy. It depends on the practitioner mastering a body of skill and exercising it to some worthwhile purpose.

And what is worthwhile about it? Carey puts it this way: “For journalism and for us, that purpose is the development and enhancement of public life, a common life which we can all share as citizens.” The title of his talk where he says all this is, “The struggle against forgetting.”

Journalism is a part of that struggle, the simplest act of which is recording the events of the day. So a journal writer has origins in common with a journal-ist. They are members of the same family. And this is one reason that weblogs, which the press calls “online journals,” are an event within journalism—the practice of it, as well as our ideas about it.

Article Author: Jay Rosen

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