If Journalism Were a Park

If journalism were a park, what sort of park would it be? Strange question? Maybe, but how we answer it could help determine how we approach the future of journalism.

Last week at a conference in Stanford, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen used a tale of two parks to discuss how the Internet has reshaped journalism. He first described the pristine, quiet, private Gramercy Park, a gated green space that most New Yorkers aren’t allowed to visit , and compared it to the grittier, vibrant, public Washington Square Park near NYU’s campus.

Rosen compared traditional journalism to Gramercy Park, but said that journalism in the digital age is more akin to Washington Square Park. Yes, it’s a little messy. Yes, it's louder. But now, it's open to the public. Too often, when we talk about the ways the Internet has challenged old business models we ignore the profound importance of this point.

For Rosen, journalism’s central purpose is public engagement. He said, the arc of press history is a tale of people demanding more access to information and more ability to participate in society. The openness of the Internet is the next part of that story; it has already dramatically increased public participation in journalism.

Rosen worries that in debates over the future of journalism, we are too quick to look for utopias. Neither Washington Square Park or the Internet are a utopia, but both are better for being open. We need to refocus our discussion about how to make journalism better, not how to make it perfect. To that end, Joshua Cohen, a political science scholar from Stanford, offered a helpful addition, saying that while openness is good, it is also not enough.

Cohen says if journalism is to be part of a healthy public discourse, it must be:

• Deliberative - introducing us to new information and differences of views;
• Accessible - providing equal and low-cost access to information;
• Participatory - including opportunities for public influence; and,
• Quality - including high quality, vetted information.

Washington Square Park is not just a great place because it is open to the public, argued Cohen, it’s a great place because of what goes on there, the qualities of the activities that openness makes possible.

One point that neither Rosen nor Cohen addressed, however, was that Washington Square Park is open because New York City owns the land, takes care of it (as best they can), and has clear rules designed to both keep it open and make it safe. This point is important, as it addresses Rosen’s metaphor in the larger discussion about the role of public policy and the future of journalism.

If we accept Rosen’s metaphor that Washington Square Park is a better model for journalism than Gramercy Park, then we need to ask what role the government should have to care for and foster our public square. We need to develop and advocate for public policies that will protect the openness that Rosen celebrates. In the near term, this means that journalists (and those that care about the future of journalism) need to join the fight for Net Neutrality. In the long term, it means we need to think creatively about expanding our public media system to foster a 21st-century noncommercial media sector in America.

As we rethink the policies that shape the Internet and journalism, we need to ensure that we are not building fences around our future public square. We need public spaces in our media as much as we need them in our cities, and we need enlightened media policy -- developed hand-in-hand with the public – to make that happen.