Network to explore "civic function of news"

Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship, is launching an RSA Journalism Network over on the RSA Networks site.

The public’s declining trust in the news media is a worrying trend. The RSA and the Reuters Institute of Journalism are looking at how we can support the civic function of news. We’re particularly interested in how professional journalists and Fellows relate to the public’s ideas about news and what it is for.

Great topic - and maybe this network could provide an opportunity, among other things,  to explore what the BBC plans are in this field. As I quoted in that post, Stephen has said:

The BBC is dropping/has dropped the Action Network. It plans to do a number of other exciting things along these lines in the coming months. The Action network (previously iCan) was always meant to be an experiment. The BBC is right to learn from experiments and change course if that's what seems right.

As well as his position at Leeds University, Stephen is Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute, which maybe explains the connection.
The timing of the project is right, with growing interest in the shifting role of journalists, as citizens produce content for themselves. Charlie Beckett explored that in Networked Journalism: For the people and with the people. More in posts cited below.
I do, however, hope that Stephen makes a commitment to bring the network out from behind the RSA Networks login, as we did with The Membership Project once it had some initial RSA support and interest from Fellows (members). The RSA is running a terrific series of public lectures, free and open to anyone - why not follow the same approach online? I can't see how it is possible to have a useful discussion about media and citizenship in an old-style walled garden. You can link out - but people outside are then forced to come to "your place" to join in. This seems particularly inappropriate on this topic, where issues are so interesting precisely because the Internet has created a public commons.
I've argued the open approach and the case for distributed communities in the RSA, though I  can also see the case for private spaces for member-to-member discussions. In this instance I think that Stephen Coleman, the RSA and the Reuters Institute will provide more public benefit by sharing the conversation with everyone. Journalists would agree - wouldn't they?
Previously on Stephen Coleman, the BBC, and open-closed:

• BBC leads us behind the scenes on new media, if not news
• BBC plans to sustain citizenship and civil society. Please tell us how.
• TV voting scandals and poor e-democracy both destroy trust
• Do communities need boundaries?

Comments

[Paul Caplan]

One would hope journalists would agree but speaking as a former hack, those walled gardens are very useful for hiding behind. Makes you feel like an embattled war correspondent, which I guess they are.

Anyway I agree that the RSA would be foolish to try and contain this discussion even if they could. Far better to encourage as wide a conversation as possible. Why not launch a specific tag and then encourage debate anywhere and everywhere and let the tag do the formatting and collecting and connecting. Let the tags form the new walled garden.

If the RSA doesn't do it, someone else will... or already has

[paul canning]

Some journalists would agree, David. But the Matthew Taylors and Andrew Keens of this world wouldn't: hence the walled garden.

I would honestly suspect that their motivations lie less in 'the public’s declining trust' than in shoring up old media and having a good ole moan about those damnable bloggers, who have amongst those responsible for that declining trust as they parse media agendas (I just did this on the Obama speech and the BBC's US reporters - lots of people doing this sort of thing is threatening).

Good on you for having a gentle go at them.

[David Wilcox]

Thanks Paul and Paul ... I'm a former hack too, now a social reporter I guess and remember two things used to agitate journalists: hidden places ... nd people talking about the failings of journalists in public. Some tension then:-) What's the tag then? How do we out it?

[Dave Briggs]

As I have mentioned, elsehwhere, David, I am right behind you (not in a scary way!).

This is too big and important a discussion to have behind closed doors.

As for a tag, civicjournalismuk seems to be empty on technorati and del.icio.us - maybe use that?

[David Wilcox]

civicjournalismuk sounds good - spread the word