Above all the claims about the need to save journalism, about it being essential to our society, etc, this fact seems to be missed: the more essential journalism is supposed to be, the more continuously prevalent it should appear throughout history.
How much historical continuity is there? Where did journalism really come from? What is it actually supposed to accomplish? I want to take a deeper look at what journalism is and where it came from.
The kind of journalism currently being evangelized (or eulogized) by people in newsrooms across North America is only a very recent and specific development. It’s enabled by certain technologies and suited to deal with specific kinds of problems that are being eclipsed. Journalism is compelled to evolve accordingly.
To say it evolves doesn’t mean the whole thing picks up and plops itself down in another position. The word (and the idea) “journalism” doesn’t refer to a distinct and coherent unity, it only points towards a diverse family that is genetically related to a lot of other families of practice — history, literature, entertainment, politics (think propaganda), literary criticism, education, etc — and these relations are constantly evolving, new branches are constantly added (and trimmed) on the family trees.
It’s important to appreciate that evolution does not occur merely “in order to” address other changes. It isn’t deliberate or by design. Journalistic practices and influences are changing from the inside-out as well. Many journalists and organizations are naturally drawn to shiny new tools and exciting new challenges…
Or rather, journalism has always been fed by neighbouring fields and families of practice. Professional journalism has been a kind of refuge and safety net, or runway, for aspiring novelists, dramatists, philosophers, and poets. To the list of moonlighters and people trying to make a name for themselves via journalism we can also add think-tankers, academics, activists, and any number of people who are eternally unsure of what they want to do when they grow up.
None of these people have exactly the same aims… [when I got to this point a discussion came up on Twitter about defining journalism (#jdef), the rest of this post will be affected by it (hat tip @jeffjarvis and @knightfdn)].
Some journalists are motivated by principles — safeguarding democracy, standing up for the little guy, uncovering error and evil, etc — while others are motivated by a belief in their own creative & intellectual talents, and many journalists (let’s be honest) simply want to put in the hours and get paid at the end of the day.
There isn’t really a unifying aim. As Jeff Jarvis insisted, you can’t really put a definition around all of “journalism” and say that “what’s on this side of the line is journalism, what’s on the other side is not.”
It involves a lot of reporting and fact-finding but that isn’t the end of it. Journalism also involves interpretation, narration, and criticism — selecting what’s important, showing how this-relates-to-that, explaining or demonstrating why anyone should care.
But even though we can’t make it exclusive and distinct, we can’t resist the urge to identify what it means. I take “journalism” to mean providing frames of context and relevance, managing all the intermediating facts and ideas that we use as social currency, making knowledge available and useful in our lives.
The most succinct and striking definition I saw in the #jdef stream was one of the first (from @yelvington):
“Journalism is a process by which a society perceives itself.”
Getting right down to the bland etymology of the word, journalism means making a record of a journey. Don’t confuse “journey” with “quest” though. While there are connotations of adventure, the root means “day” — as in “travel of the day” (think of “journeyman” — someone who works by day-by-day). So journalism is means “a record of day-to-day events.”
Satisfied?
No, I knew you wouldn’t be. Journalism is a lot more than keeping a record — if only because people seldom agree on what happened, nor how to emphasize particular aspects over others.
More important is that we don’t tend to stop at just “keeping a record”: we’re also inclined to interpret. We form predictions, opinions, and arguments in the process.
Why? Is there a purpose?
No — not a teleological purpose anyways. Instead of asking why (as in what’s the ultimate aim, or what we’re going towards) we should ask where these impulses came from.
Think of it in Darwinian terms. We can imagine how tribes and societies that kept records, formed opinions, defined ideas, and pursued articulate aims would have prevailed over tribes and societies that did not.
Even before written accounts evolved, humans (or proto-humans) that shared information about dangers and opportunities — “here’s how to defend yourself against a tiger… here’s how to catch the most fish… don’t eat mushrooms shaped like this…” — tended to survive and procreate more effectively than those that didn’t.
So the urge to document and share knowledge is largely innate.
Even if the particular information turns out to be useless or mundane, we can’t help wanting to know and tell it because individuals with the know-and-tell genes had more grandchildren (and great-grandchildren, etc) than those who just liked laying under a tree all day or killing stuff without telling other people about it, and we inherited that trait from them.
In other words, that feeling of “I have to tweet about this!” has the same source as the impulse our ancestors had to share heroic tales and local lore from generation to generation — stories that became tent poles for shared social identity and perhaps the biggest reason our species (and certainly our civilization) is here to talk, tweet, and write about it today.
What will the next generation’s notion of journalism be — or even next year’s?
Whatever it will be, it will accommodate the essential impulse that we all have to share knowledge and stories. You can’t put boundaries around that.
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