Thread: "A Media Ecologist Explains the Many Crises in Journalism."

Notes and slides from my lecture to the Media Ecology Association, June 18, 2020. https://www.media-ecology.org/convention 

Throwaway image: what my scribbled scheme looked like eight days out. 1/

Title slide 2/

Twelve years into my experience floating ideas on Twitter, I can anticipate some of the misunderstandings, and try to head them off. Pro tip: never say something is new. It's not worth it. 3/

The lecture proper begins. 4/

Each of the eight crises is tersely explained. 5/

6/ "Turning to" or was already there, like public radio.

As I said, each crisis is like a folder on your desktop. Click and there are others inside. 7/

Second of eight crises. 8/

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I did a different lecture on this theme. Here's the link https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar/what-i-learned-watching-american-press-try-cover-donald-trump 10/

By "expensive" I mean the cost in pride, lost authority, internal struggle, rewritten textboooks and codes of conduct, bad faith attacks from opportunists, etc. 11/

Number six of my eight crises in American journalism 12/

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Lincoln Steffens on civic corruption (1904): "I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts." 15/

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The purpose of pulling the eight crises apart is to put them back together: 17/

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The problem of bad actors. 19/

I know some of you have been waiting for this. 20/

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I have no "solution" that scales with the crises. And the last line of my dissertation (1986) was: "Making facts public does not a public make." If there is a path, it starts with publics that know they need journalism, and journalists who know they need an active public. 22/