Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect. But perhaps we shouldn’t use the j-word.
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 bought to you by corporate imperialists or libertine liberals.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to listen to Ethan Zuckerman speak during MIT’s Communications Forum, “What is Civic Media?” After the event, I spoke to Ethan Zuckerman about Global Voices Online, an organization that he co-founded with journalist Rebecca McKinnon through Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Global Voices Online (GVO) describes itself as “a non-profit global citizens’ media project” that “seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.”