The Future of Education

In the last ten years, citizen journalism has emerged to become a major political force in international journalism. While not a new phenomenon, its scope and influence, powered by dramatic new technologies made possible through networked computer communication, has dramatically contributed to populist uprisings on the left and right. On the side of mainstream corporate journalism, citizen journalism was first seen as a threat to its economic base and to its knowledge authority. Now it is being cultivated in order to heighten efficiencies in news reporting and production; increase public trust in aging corporate media institutions, burnish the brand image of corporate journalism as being in the public interest, create legitimacy for coalitions with political leaders for crackdowns on “fake” news and increase profitability through deepening reader allegiance through citizen/audience engagement. On the citizen journalist side, we see a continued proliferation of voices claiming to speak for the invisible and the disenfranchised, and to speak with the authenticity of the “real” people and “facts” gathered, analyzed and distributed in the public interest. At the same time, we see an increase in the use of social networks for political as well as economic disinformation campaigns, foreign and domestic. In this paper, drawing on the work of the American Pragmatist tradition, we argue that journalism educators, rather than being distracted by the debates over fake news, must refocus on the nature and meaning of the public interest. What is needed, we argue, to evaluate citizen journalism, is a fuller understanding of the conditions under which a self-aware public emerges, capable of expressing its interests, guiding the inquiry necessary to engage and act on those interests, and being clearly involved in the evaluation of the consequences of those actions and the decisions for how to act next in light of those consequences. For democratic journalism education to move into the post-factual age, is not to abandon collective values and the appreciation of the interdependence of individuals in community, but to move beyond faiths in absolute knowledge to the grounding of knowledge in the actions of self-aware communities.

Keywords: Journalism Education, Citizen Journalism, Networks, Public Interest, Pragmatism, Dewey;