I’ve been writing almost exclusively about Drupal (working on it, too). But I’m coming up for some air. So here are some notes about newspapers and the web.

Steve points to a great Tim Porter rant about old-media thinking in the wake of the Knight-Ridder deal.

Then Tim jumps off to an angry Vin Crosbie who seems ready to write the whole industry off as a bunch of out-of-touch, fad-chasing incompetents.

Meanwhile, I’m also frustrated by the alternative being offered here: the utopian fantasy that if the news media would only incorporate ‘citizen journalism,’ all will be well. Bullsh*t!

Yes, I think that most of mainstream media long lost ago lost touch with a plurality — if not majority — of their audience. I agree that much of traditional media might have been complacently ‘talking down’ to their audience for years. I indeed think that “citizen journalism’ is an excellent tool for helping to repairing those problems; but it is just one of many new tools needed. Most of “the people formerly known as the audience” still want to be the audience, don’t want the onus of reporting the news themselves, and the ongoing data — including those from ‘citizen journalism’ projects that have existed for a few years — about citizens’ involvement in journalism isn’t and won’t reverse the declining usage of news.

And here Vin is absolutely right. The ‘news’ just isn’t much of a pull for most people. But there are two notions crammed into the overused ‘citizen journlism’ phrase that — if we parse them out — are worth striving towards.

1) ‘Citizen’ is generally taken to mean a legal member of a country or community. But it has further meaning as an engaged, committed member of that community. Citizens, to swipe from Robert Puttnam, don’t bowl alone. They join or form leagues. Citizens interact. They connect. They act based on (gasp) enlightened self-interest. We should all be citizens (though I’m not one right now in my hometown).

A few months back, I channeled Tocqueville to frame some of what we’re doing online these days. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville argues that the fundamental role of the newspaper is to bring together citizens by uniting people around common cause.

Kinda wacky; kinda noble. Very worth doing.

2) ‘Journalism’ nowadays means the professional (objective?) reporting of important events. But the root of the word comes from the daily chronicles of the lives of ordinary people (journaling). I agree that people don’t want to act as modern journalists — cj will never replace professional reporters. But if we can capture the random thoughts of our friends and neighbors using online journals — or whatever other tools we can think up — then we can feed those joys, complaints, issues, concerns, et. al. to the professional journalists.

In this case, the newspaper is a professional body that (as I have said before) amplifies the public voice rather than broadcasts to it. When we get it right, this is what projects like Blufton Today make possible.