E-Media Tidbits

Amy Gahran Should J schools be teaching media literacy -- to everyone?

As Barbara K. Iverson mentioned in an earlier Tidbit, BlogNetNews.com is collaborating with the Knoxville News-Sentinel to point online readers to about 30 "good local blogs," as Dave Mastio describes the compilation. "In a few years, it is going to be a no-brainer for local publications to have a window into what's happening in the local blogosphere as a way to attract readers and to build partnership with local bloggers," Mastio says.

That's very good business, of course, as news staffs shrink and many-to-many conversations replace the traditional gatekeeper's role of the one-to-many model that mainstream media clung to for so long -- almost to the point of non-relevance, if not outright extinction.

Newspapers now get it -- yay (or maybe yawn)! Proactive media consumers got it before newspapers by creating their own alternate home pages for news on Yahoo and Google, among others, and loading them with RSS feeds of personal interest. But many consumers are still not sufficiently media literate or discerning -- or perhaps simply too lazy or time starved -- to do all that work and participate in the many-to-many conversation taking place throughout the media. These people still want gatekeepers, and they want those gatekeepers to come from the mainstream (read: recognizable) media.

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For example, many (certainly not all) of my students at George Mason University simply don't trust blogs if they don't recognize the source. It reminds me of the days when many online consumers didn't trust online payment methods (many still don't). Too many media consumers still look at information provided online (and I suppose you could say online journalism as a whole) as irresponsible at best and inaccurate or unreliable at worst. Print journalists seem to be over that stigma for the most part, but I really wonder whether the public in general has caught up yet.

The answer to my mind is increased media literacy: familiarize the audience -- students in my case -- with blogs and teach them how to analyze a variety of information and make up their own minds (there's a concept for you!). Journalism programs should be in the business of media literacy, not just training journalists. That should be a campus-wide goal that engages majors from every department.

I have regularly used discussion forums in the past with my classes but have expanded that to include blogs and, soon, wikis, to better engage students and increase their comfort level with these vehicles. All our online journalism students write their own blogs, and we are using class blogs as well.

By applying the same standards of journalism to their entries in these forums, the students learn to trust that blogs and wikis can demonstrate a high level of responsibility and, ultimately, credibility.

Everything you read in a blog or wiki may not be true. That is in equal part the consumer's responsibility as a media-literate citizen. It's just a tough lesson to teach when we all know that if you read it in the newspaper, then it must be true!