First of a three-part series America’s tradition of impactful pamphleteer activism is more than alive and well. It has never been easier for individuals to build their own seats at the table, forcing the top-down cultures of industrial media to confront their own inadequacies and acknowledge (only after kicking and screaming) the newcomers’ contributions.
Name a subject that dominant city newspapers have walked away from covering intensely — statehouse politics, high school sports, local crime — and you’ll find some entrepreneurial characters filling the void with gusto.
Four law students in Washington, unhappy with the lukewarm journalistic and legal interest in the bizarre 2006 slaying of a young District resident in his home, created a blog called Who Murdered Robert Wone? in December 2008 as a clearinghouse for news, legal theories and comments about the case (the blog takes no official position on whodunit).
The site proved so popular that the criminal trial of Wone’s roommates was standing-room-only for a month. The 2010 verdict made the front page, and a civil wrongful-death case and/or settlement remains a hot local story.
This new bottoms-up media is more than just motivated amateurs dedicating more energy to a given topic than any journalism professional will, or can, muster. There are also the myriad databases, work-arounds and aggregators enriching our media consumption by organizing and curating the online world.
Where there once stood gatekeepers, mediators and critics telling you what and how you should think, there is now full-fledged retreat and chaos. Newsweek, once a powerhouse of received and regurgitated wisdom, legendarily self-appointed to “write the first draft of history,” was sold for all of $1 in 2010 and later merged with Tina Brown’s gossipy politics/celebrity website the Daily Beast.
The once-infallible Reader’s Digest went bankrupt in 2009. Ostensibly straight-shooting CNN may be “the most trusted name in news,” but it’s finishing a distant third to more opinionated challengers in the cable news wars it once dominated.
Never before in history has it been easier to produce, disseminate and consume media — preferably at the same time. The customer is no longer captive to Walter Cronkite’s wisdom or Dan Rather’s armadillo stories.
Individuals now own the means of production, attached to history’s greatest distribution channel — the Internet. There are an estimated 150 million weblogs, 200 million Twitter accounts and 750 million active Facebook users.
“The people formerly known as the audience,” in press critic Jay Rosen’s apt phrasing, are now practiced in the arts of writing headlines, sizing photographs, shooting and editing video, producing animation, determining the veracity of sources, processing reader reactions, connecting with audiences, networking with like-minded producers and performing dozens of other activities that, until recently, were mostly the province of credentialed professionals.
Instead of greeting the news of an engaged, democratized, easier-to-find audience and source pool with parades down Main Street, the legacy media have reacted with barely disguised horror.
Every year, like a pack of crows announcing the arrival of winter, several anxious big-media lifers pronounce journalism to be on death’s door. It isn’t.
The ever-more-user-friendly World Wide Web has made not just media, but politics too, a much more fluid and unpredictable place. And now is the time to use the new media force to confront the grave problems that politicians have been busy foisting on us.
Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.com. Matt Welch is editor in chief of Reason magazine. They are co-authors of the new book, “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America,” from which this column is excerpted.
