The Farm Report

I noticed it 30 years ago, when I began teaching. In my history class, students seemed to have little interest in the cast of characters until photography came along. Pictures changed the way we looked at history. We were never as interested in George Washington as were in Abraham Lincoln. It was because of those portraits of Lincoln, where we could look into his haunted eyes.

You can’t hide from pictures. The horrific video of a young woman bleeding out on a Tehran street not only makes the political upheaval in Iran more tangible, it also shows the power of new media. We don’t turn to television, toward any immaculately dressed network news anchor, to see these images. We click on YouTube and get handheld cell phone video from a helpless bystander.

The photographer was a doctor, not a journalist. But the new media have changed the way we regard journalism and changed the very nature of the game. That journalists are bitching about this is somewhat hypocritical. Journalists have always bowed and scraped before the gods of competition. We believe that competitive journalism is better journalism. And as newspapers folded or were gobbled up by chains, we lamented at the cost of competition. If you wanted to create a competitor in a one-newspaper town, you were out of luck unless you have a couple billion for start-up cash.

Now all it takes is a kid with a keyboard or a bystander with a cell phone. The citizen journalist is all around us. It’s taken us back to the days of colonial journalism in America when a kid with a printing press could make a difference. So why should we – i.e., journalists – bitch about this?

Because we can. As Morley Safer said this week, “I would trust a citizen journalist as much as I would trust a citizen surgeon.” Agreed, big guy.

There are still a number of questions to be raised about how new media have democratized journalism. I go into detail about this in my new piece for The Florida Engineer. In the piece, I chat with Tom Wolfe about his concerns about how new media and all of our cool new time-saving toys are eating all of the precious hours from our too-brief lives on this planet.

But if we raise issues about any of this, we’re put down as Luddite assholes for even asking questions. (Odd . . . that would seem to make them the small-minded ones.)

Certainly, information posted on the New York Times Web site carries with it the credibility of that magnificent franchise. Maybe JoeBobsDailyNews.com can’t complete with that. (Don’t Google that. To the best of my knowledge, there is no JoeBobsDailyNews.com).

The arrogance of now – whatever generation sits in the throne room – is that what we have achieved is it. But we need to see that we are always in transition. The over-used buzz phrase on campuses these days is that “change is the only constant.” Like all clichés, it suffers from truth.

Newspapers and news organizations are evolving. The public now has tools to rival a reporter’s toys. We’re coming together and something new is emerging. It’s fun to watch and it’s scary. We teeter on the precipice of trivialization. If you don’t believe me, ponder the media attention this week given to Perez Hilton’s face cut and resulting rant.

Yet on the other side of the precipice is a new world order of information sharing. It continues to make this — despite the media saturation of “Jon and Kate Plus 8” — a fascinating time to be a media watcher.

Sometimes, my friends in the newspaper business tell me they’re baffled that our journalism enrollments are through the roof at the University of Florida. We are more than 100 students above our enrollment cap in journalism. Despite bad news in the news business, students still  line up to petition to get into our program.

“Don’t they read newspapers?” my friends ask. “Don’t they realize what’s happening to our business?”

Of course they do. But I have some good news.  The best of today’s students still have the same convictions about public service and the people’s right to know as any newspaper journalist. They are committed to strong and accurate storytelling.

They’re just not so sure that these functions require newsprint.

I tell my friends that today’s journalism students have “faith in the function, if not the form” of journalism. No matter how it’s delivered, there will always be a demand for news and information.