What’s Wrong with News and Is Jay Rosen Fixing It?

Posted on September 21, 2006
Filed Under What's New, For Argument's Sake |

Continuing a recently established tradition of being at least a day late with a story I want to reflect on Jay Rosen’s efforts to get Reuters investing in New Assignment.net and sad to say I want to criticise his initiative.

“The money from Reuters will underwrite the costs of hiring our first editor, who will start in early 2007.”

This is Jay Rosen’s explanation of New Assignment and after it I’ll say why I think the emphasis is wrong.

“The idea is to draw “smart crowds”—groups of people configured to share intelligence—into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren’t getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that’s most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadlines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the “pro-am” part.”

Here’s what’s wrong with that. There are plenty, plenty stories out there on the web, that are researched and investigated that don’t make news. My belief is that the public feel under served by that as much as or even more than they feel under-served by investigations.

Here’s an example. There is rock solid proof that dental amalgam does not belong in your mouth, that it causes inflammation in the gums (which creates a nice line of revenue for orthodontists) and the mercury in it migrates to different parts of the body not least the brain where it is implicated in Multiple Sclerosis. Dental amalgam resides in the majority of mouths and is making people sick in one way or antoher. Recent research shows high metal levels in the breasts of breast cancer victims and thre’s now speculation about its impact on prostate cancer.

At a push I could name a half dozen stories like that where evidence is out there but where all forms of media fail the public by ignoring the story, ignoring the evidence and rejecting the possibility of pushing a reformist agenda onto the establishment.

Bringing counter-establishment stories to fruition is as important as creating new lines of investigation, more so because you can investigate until the start of the 22and century but unless you bring weight to bear on the conclusions you just fill more web pages.

If Jay Rosen were to address the inconclusive consequences of significant information then I’d say we would be using the web, networks and balanced judgment neatly together.

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