Lou Heldman on media, technology and society

I've been playing with Twitter the past few days, trying to understand the strange appeal of posting and perusing 140-character tweets from friends. Along came veteran Wichita Eagle court reporter Ron Sylvester to demonstrate Twitter's effectiveness as a news tool. Ron has been following a hot local murder trial, posting frequent updates via Twitter. It's dramatic, informative and addicting to follow Ron's posts, known as tweets. Just a few days into the trial, the American Bar Association Journal has posted an online story on Ron's experiment.

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In preparing the item below for the blog and the op-ed page of The Wichita Eagle, I wanted to use the familiar quotation: "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."  I wasn't sure who said it, but when the first Google item I clicked on said H.L. Mencken, I thought, "of course, Mencken," and went on my merry way. This morning I got this message from Rhonda Holman, one of the editors on the page:

In your commentary, you wrote: "In pre-television days, the renowned American cynic, H.L. Mencken, said, 'Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.'" A bit of Internet searching indicates this is often misattributed to Mencken and should be attributed to A.J. Liebling. 

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Inexpensive technology has put the tools of mass communication in the hands of the masses, diluting the power of traditional news media. We are in the early days of a rapidly expanding movement of do-it-yourself news, often called citizen journalism. I think it has great potential for serving democracy.

The renowned American cynic, H.L. Mencken, said, "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."

Now everyone with a computer and Internet connection is a potential publisher; everyone with a video-enabled cell phone is a potential broadcaster.

 This unprecedented power shift is not without risk.

In two recent columns in The Wichita Eagle, Davis "Buzz" Merritt, my colleague at the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State, raised alarm about the potential dangers of iReport.com. It’s a site owned by and run by CNN as a sort of YouTube for news. It allows anyone to post news video with none of the accuracy, fairness and taste filters provided by traditional news organizations.

Professor Merritt raises the excellent point that current law protecting Internet activity gives no ready legal recourse to those who may be harmed by false reports. That should be corrected. 

But we should never go back to the days, just now coming to an end, when a small number of professional journalists, known as gatekeepers, got to decide what everyone should read, hear and see.

Merritt paints an ugly picture of iReport.com’s potential content as “stuff posted directly by any idiot or criminal with a camera and a computer.” That’s not what I see when I actually look at the site.

This week’s most viewed story subjects included the 2008 Presidential election and natural disasters in China and Myanmar. There were also silly videos about bridesmaid dresses, but no content fluffier than you’d find in the features portions of most newscasts.

Merritt finds CNN irresponsible for posting amateur video that hasn’t gone through a professional vetting process. I think CNN and other news organizations are smart to encourage citizen journalism.  Pushing back a frontier always involves danger, but the harm is usually offset by the resulting progress.

On a national level, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is encouraging community foundations to develop local experiments in citizen journalism.

I’m working with the Wichita Community Foundation to put together a local group to brainstorm ideas for Sedgwick County. If you want to be involved, send me an email. Or a video!

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1. Have a plan. 2. Have a backup plan because the first plan won't work. 3. The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get. 4. Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.    

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Kafka's story works beautifully in its cruel paradoxical logic, yet it leaves us without a solution, not necessarily because there isn't one, but because in the world in which the hunger artist's performance is no longer visible, the performance can only work if we understand why it is impossible. 

I was thinking about Kafka's story when I read about this year's Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism. I applaud the work and congratulate the winners, but think the prizes themselves have become marginalized.

When I was Managing Editor of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, we were fortunate enough to win the Pulitzer for coverage of a devastating local flood. That prize was one of the best experiences of my professional life and helped me get a promotion to the Miami Herald. I was in newsrooms for other Pulitzers in Detroit and Miami, and I twice got to participate as a panelist in the Pulitzer judging process at Columbia University, when I was publisher in State College.

So my feelings don't stem from bitterness. I just think maybe time has passed for Pulitzers that focus only on newspapers and their web sites. It's time for prizes that disregard platform and focus just on outstanding journalism, in whatever form it appears.

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