The precipitous slide of journalism from iconic cultural power status to cultural irrelevance during the past decade is stunning. When the Shorenstein Center's Prof. Tom Patterson told his board last month that the nation's premiere think tank of, by and for top-notch news media was going to think less about journalism and more about public policy, it was a real wakeup call. The Harvard students just aren't as interested as they used to be in journalism, he explained.

It's hard to find anyone these days who promotes the notion of the journalist as public hero. With the exception of George Clooney's "Goodnight and Good Luck," the popular culture has written off the MSM as just so many hacks brought to you by corporate imperialists or libertine liberals.

Now even citizen journalists are also falling into ill repute. Jeff Howe of Wired, who created the term "crowdsourcing," assailed at a Nieman Foundation talk this fall the "flawed assumption that people want to do what journalists do." His Assignment Zero six-month experiment, which invited the open source journalism world to do its own fact-checking, was not a success.

He concluded that people connected virtually could not build up communities "interested in covering a certain subject." What he found instead was that not only were people "not good at" hyperlocal coverage, but what came in from them was "press releases and a lot of hate speech." Local websites that are all UGC are not the news about City Hall, he concluded, even though that is what people actually need. "You go to the website from your hometown to keep up with things, not to see everyone's prom pictures."

Rise of Online Community Journalism

Enter Jack Driscoll, former editor of the Boston Globe, former editor-in-residence at the MIT Media Lab, and now advisor to MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, to turn this around. Jack dedicates his new book, "Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism," to reporters "of every variety," saying "their role is more vital to democracy than ever."

If Clark Kent isn't there to cover the city council because he's been laid off, then perhaps volunteer citizen reporters can step in, Jack says. To be sure, he isn't about to throw the professionals overboard. He agrees with Persephone Miel of Harvard's Berkman Center, who said at a conference earlier this year, "The old media are broken. Bloggers didn't break them. Bloggers won't fix them."

Jack isn't swooning over the notion that anyone off the street can do investigative journalism in a sustained and focused way and he isn't carried away by the random dramatic tweets, YouTube videos and Flickr photos from people who happened to be in the right (or wrong) place when something like the Indonesian tsunami or the Mumbai terrorist attacks took place. He's talking here about something in between: group-generated community journalism by people in Melrose, Mass., Rye, N.H., and elsewhere who are finding new excitement and power through organized community news efforts. They are offering some hyperlocal watchdogging that local newspapers seem increasingly unable or unwilling to perform. And despite Jeff Howe's complaints, some of them are covering local government where none of the professional journalists are bothering to look.

Jack has written about what he has learned through three citizen journalism experiments he started: The Melrose Mirror Silver Stringers, a group of over 100 senior citizens working over the past 12 years to publish their online news and cultural site; the Junior Journal, which began 10 years ago at the MIT Media Lab and engaged more than 300 teenagers from 91 countries to put out a global news service; and The Rye Reflections, where Jack currently leads a band of 15 neighbors.

Jack agrees with Persephone Miel that the technology isn't the hard part. It's the people. Jack's book is full of enthusiasm for how journalism can revive old people and empower young ones. He's also full of practical advice about interviewing, writing, and editing. He has lived the pro/am model and now shares his secrets of success. If anyone can make citizen journalism work, it's Jack.

It is great for more citizens to become engaged in their communities and commit acts of journalism. Yet even Jack agrees that they cannot replace entirely the professional journalists who are disappearing. This does not seem to be a concern for the public, particularly those under 40, who appear content to get their news through social networks, for free -- and may not notice, at first, if the local newspaper or even The New York Times has withered to nothing.

Who out there is working on the issue of building a culture that supports best practice reporting, editing and dissemination of journalism? Renee Hobbs from Temple University was at MIT today for a conference with students and teachers about media literacy, which is part of the solution. She, Erin Reilly and Henry Jenkins are thinking creatively about how to build out the new media practices for civic engagement. But they and Jack can't do it alone.

Who is innovating the business models that will pay for good investigative journalism -- the hard kind, the unpopular stories that nevertheless are essential to accountable governance? There are experiments galore, but no one seems to have cracked the economics nut. Not micropayments (such as Spot.us) nor pro/am models (like the Chi-Town Daily News) nor even the new GlobalPost experiment in foreign news, has solved the structural issues bedeviling the professional press corps.

Philanthropy (ProPublica) is nice for a while, but it is not enough to sustain over time this check-and-balance function that is key to a successful democratic culture. Every time someone touts citizen journalism, look closely at what made it work: virtually every time, it is the moment that professional journalists organized or picked up the citizens' work and offered it to the world. And Jack fulfills that model himself.

What are you reading, and thinking, and watching that might advance our collective thinking about these questions? Please tag as "civicmedia" articles in Delicious that might help build this exploration. And don't hesitate to share your thoughts, or those of others that you think relevant, at our Center for Future Civic Media discussion forums.

We will be hosting some face-to-face discussions at the Center in 2009 that attempt to make progress on these issues. We will podcast these conversations and invite the virtual civic media community to participate. Two rules: no MSM end-days hand-wringing, and no inordinate new media faith in technology alone. Join us to build a positive culture and practice with these exciting new tools, as Jack has illustrated in his new book, to support the flow of information and engagement that real geographic communities need.

It was another collision between the right to privacy in posting on the web, and the right to transparency in figuring out the value of what has been posted.

I would like to know what others think about this debate. Should we track down and expose people who pretend to be individuals, but in fact represent paid political opposition groups, who are sending out mass messages that are blatantly false and deliberately damaging to the character/issue at hand? Is it ok to track them down and simply expose them for who they really are and steer people to more verified sources of information on the subject at hand?

In my previous life as a journalist, exposure was what we were aiming for: to show people what was really behind the Wizard's curtain by verifying facts and separating them from myths. Once they knew what was real and what was false, the theory went, people could make informed judgments based on the facts. It doesn't always turn out that way, but tools that make web postings more transparent seem positive when used in this context. Do we have to protect the noxious slime-mongers in order to also ensure that people who want to post authentic material honestly will be able to do so anonymously? Can we expose anonymity in one case, and protect it in another, without being hypocritical or damaging to civic media?

Alyssa decided to try something to counter what she felt was the toxic cultural impact of the "See Something, Say Something" campaign. She recognized that she couldn't eliminate that campaign entirely, because people do want to be vigilant against possible acts of terrorism. But they could also understand strength and security in their communities a different way--as a matter of people taking care of each other, even as strangers. She decided to invite people to start looking for acts of heroism, generosity and civic engagement, however small or fleeting they might seem.

Her "Hero Reports" project (http://heroreports.org) has since won the attention of John Hockenberry's "The Takeaway" morning public radio program, and may be replicated in other cities. Here is how it works: anyone can go to her website or text message her in order to fill out a very brief form citing an act of courage, selflessness or special courtesy they have witnessed or experienced. It can be "challenging a racist stereotype, providing a stranger's bus fare, helping a disabled person across the street, assisting someone in difficulty," Alyssa says. She counts even small "acts of community" as heroic. The forms collect information about the date, time, place and description of the hero report. She is gleaning some of them from first-person accounts, and some from news media accounts. She hopes to collect at least 1,944 reports to match the number of suspicion reports under the See Something, Say Something MTA campaign.

At the end of the summer, Alyssa will present a collection of her Hero Reports to the New York MTA. She also is mapping the reports on her website, so that New Yorkers can see their security in a new way, as a series of places where acts of civic heroism--rather than crimes, which are so often plotted on these news maps--have taken place.

Alyssa's challenge was to design, build and operate the interfaces, website and database. She wanted it to look like the MTA's advertisements. Anyone who wants to contribute a report should do so soon--and if anyone wants to give feedback to Alyssa about the project, she is at apw217@mit.edu

Of course that's the last century's story. Few people seem to believe any more in the public-interest motives or practical utility of the elite professional journalism corps. Digital media technologies are disrupting the old source-journalist-politician relationships and offering exciting opportunities for our former sources to make their own home-brewed politics. As journalists struggle to figure out who will pay for their work, civic media is rising up everywhere, helping people not only to gather, analyze and distribute information, but more directly to convene various publics who stimulate policy-makers to act.

Blogs, smart phones, Google map mashups, YouTube amateur videos, open-source software, Internet web and social networking sites are famously changing everything. One can see how nodes of influence are developing in the blogosphere, for example, through patterns of connectivity mapped by John Kelly at Columbia University.

Yet most of the analytical work we see about civic media focuses on the impact of new technologies (or technological changes) on the business or broadcasting models of journalism or on the policy or legal issues. These are important topics but ones that don't necessarily define civic media - or address what makes some media civic and how we might push media to deepen engagement and reinforce social contracts. These questions defy easy explanation, partly because civic media does not fit neatly into traditional notions of public media, nor is it merely 'next generation' journalism or random "user-generated content."

Instead, we might define civic media as a combination of technology and practice that can inspire and enable an individual's engagement in real and virtual communities. As Colleen Kaman, the white paper's lead researcher and a former CNN journalist, observes, civic media "creates not only the ability but also perhaps even the responsibility to participate."

Successful civic media invites collaboration, increases participation, and broadens the diversity of voices within and across channels. Better access to information can prompt and support individual and community action. Civic media is generative and scalable. It favors networks and builds consensus. If we define civic media this way, existing technology still can qualify. Civic media includes a wide range of traditional and new platforms and tools like the printing press-based newspaper, terrestrial radio station, ham radio and cell phone networks, social networks, wifi mesh networks, satellite radio and television, websites and Internet-based social networks, software for visualizing, analyzing and distributing data, and more.

In some cases, individual and community agency might also be built into a technology itself. To paraphrase our colleague Chris Csikszentmihalyi, imagine if we built media that's intended more to meet the needs of engagement than to serve the ends of capitalism. We can design with a different set of goals, ones that enable and encourage community efforts and reward social obligations implicit in such communities.

As we work on this white paper, some of the questions we are thinking about include:

--What are the forms and functions that make some media "civic"?
--What are the civic media tools and opportunities that people should know about, in order to spur progress in their communities?
--At what points can those participating in civic media be held accountable, and to whom?
--What impacts do civic media have on the connection between information and activism?
--What is the role of expertise?
--Can or should some information be privileged so that verified facts matter more than rumors?
--Can we make media tools that are likely to lead people to take action?
--Can something be civic in one setting and not in another?
--What is the opposite of civic?

In addition to our white paper team, other graduate students working at the Center are creating new civic media tools and applications--such as handheld devices that can transfer content instantly through trusted mesh networks that avoid a centralized switching point, an online reporting and mapping project that helps a community celebrate its strengths, and an open-source voting tool that can easily be used on anyone's website. Our approach, then, reflects the duality of our Center, which is itself a collaboration between different academic traditions at MIT - one known for inventing future technologies, the other for identifying the social potential of media change.

Eventually we will post our civic media white paper, a bibliography, some case studies and a list of some civic media examples on our new website, which also is being designed and built over the summer. It will, of course, all be "civic"--inviting participation in order to improve our analysis.

--Ellen Hume, with Colleen Kaman