Toward a New Journalist's Agenda:

Responding to emerging technological and economic realities

A Nieman Foundation conference

"It is our job as editors and educators to lead others through the information jungle, to try to bring coherence to what appears to be a mounting tidal wave of data," said TOM JOHNSON of San Francisco State University. "But we are facing unique challenges because the information jungle is changing -- it's growing like kudzu. We are in the early years of the second revolution in the history of how humans store and exchange data."

Photos by STAN GROSSFELD / The Boston Globe

New media, the democratization of information, and journalism in the public interest

About this package

In May 1994, some of the nation's leading journalists and scholars gathered at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University for a conference on the role and challenges of public-interest journalism in an expanding information marketplace. The summer 1994 issue of Nieman Reports contains a report of the conference, with excerpts from three days of discussions and seven commentaries written afterward by conference participants including reporters, editors, and MIT Media Lab executive Jerome S. Rubin.

Assembled here in hypertext format are full transcripts from the conference discussion sessions (nearly 100,000 words), plus the seven commentaries, linked to pertinent documents, photographs, a few audio and video clips, numerous Internet archives, and other sites on the World Wide Web.

Users of the WWW browser Lynx have access only to text materials in a fixed-width type format, so they are missing plenty. Audio and visual materials, and the benefit of variable typography determined by each user, are accessible only with multimedia WWW browsers such as Mosaic.

Acknowledgements

Since May 21 when the conference adjourned, these individuals have contributed time or materials to this package: Melanie Sill, Jerry Kammer, Bob Phelps, Lois Fiore, Brooke Cain, Michael Rogers, John Markoff, Andy Nibley, Lew Friedland, Stan Grossfeld, Bob Merry, Tom Regan, Craig Summerhill, Denise Caruso, Alvaro Moncada and Eric Harris.

The success of the conference itself is due largely to the leadership of Nieman Foundation Curator Bill Kovach and conference organizers (and Nieman fellows) Francis Pisani, Katherine Fulton and Melanie Sill; and to all those who shared their ideas in the conference meeting room and, now, on the Internet. Thanks, everyone.

Interactivity

This is not a finished product. It is not a one-way communication. Conferees, journalists and other interested readers are invited to offer additional material to enrich what is assembled here. There are errors and omissions here, also, from lapses in the transcription and the editing of the oral discussions. Some of these session transcripts are well-augmented with supplementary material provided by conference participants; others less so. Corrections are being made and new material linked to these documents even after this has been "published."

What do you think about these issues, and about how the press should address them? One good place to discuss this is on the Internet, in the NIEMAN mailing list, established by the Nieman Foundation in the spring of 1994 in anticipation of this conference. Post your comments to nieman@nando.net. (For more information about the NIEMAN list, see the online discussion.)

Corrections, comments about this Web package and suggestions for additional material are always welcome. If you do not receive a prompt reply from me, it's probably August, and I'm on vacation and offline.

BRUCE SICELOFF, Online Editor
The News & Observer / Nando.Net
Raleigh, North Carolina
(bsicelof@nando.net)

Keynote

"Whether the technology will carry journalism into the future strengthening or overwhelming this kind of journalism is yet to be determined. But one thing is certain: Unless those of us who care about this kind of public-interest journalism become knowledgeable about the technology, conversant with its applications, and active in shaping the decisions that will be made about its uses, other forces with more powerful interests will make those decisions.

" 'More powerful interests' expressed with a rare candor by one of the most potent forces in the development of the technology, John C. Malone, the head of TCI, when he said that anyone who tries to run a corporation in the public interest should be fired."

-- From introductory remarks by BILL KOVACH, Nieman Foundation curator.

• Keynote and case studies 5/19/94.
• Content (panel and discussion) 5/20/94.
• Training (panel and discussion) 5/20/94.
• Inventing the interactive multimedia future (luncheon talk) 5/20/94.
• The democratization of the news and the future of democracy (panel and discussion) 5/20/94.
• Economics and regulation (panel and discussion) 5/20/94.
• The emerging electronic democracy (public forum) 5/20/94.
• Wrapup discussion 5/21/94.
• Summing up the challenges in four reports 5/21/94.
• The online discussion (comments posted on the NIEMAN mailing list).
• Commentary: Conclusions, a plan of action, worries ... and more questions, afterthoughts from conference participants, in seven essays from Nieman Reports Summer 1994.

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