Jay Rosen’s Eight Theses on Horizontal Journalism
There is much to be said about them, critically speaking, but they do make us think.
Jay Rosen:
1. The Great Horizontal: when people are connected across to other people as effectively as they are connected “up” to Big Media.
2. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, and today almost anyone can own one. We’re in a golden age of press freedom.
3. Anyone can doesn’t mean everyone will. But the fact that anyone can matters to everyone. And if it doesn’t now, wait: it will.
4. The more people who participate in the press the stronger the press can be. But there are many hard problems to solve first.
5. What Rusbridger calls “the mutualization of journalism” jr.ly/8t3r is a retirement program for bloggers vs. journalists.
6. When the same network that floods us with too much information works to filter that flood, verification itself begins to scale.
7. Journalists: Instead of crying about Google stealing your news, steal from Google. Start “organizing the world’s information.”
8. Instead of the readers, the viewers, the listeners or the audience, call them “the users.” This helps correct the imagination.
