Facebook vs. the newspaper, or reversing the online journalism debate

The newspaper is dying. Here, in the Portland, Oregon region, our major daily paper — the Oregonian — has been cadaverously thinner and thinner by the day. Alternative biweekly Portland Tribune recently ceased publishing its Tuesday edition, boasting that their content could now be found on Fridays at the newsstand, and constantly on the web, as if this had been an upgrade instead of a retrenchment. Across the river in Vancouver, the Columbian has gone bankrupt. Pink slips go out, newsrooms in the region shrink, and tongues wag about how the Blogosphere is putting newspapers out of business. What is a journalist to do?

But what I want to talk about is not the future of newspapers, or how blogs are changing our media environment. Instead, I want to talk about how the debate about the future of journalism I distracting us from the debate we ought to be having, which is how to subsume journalism into our daily lives as citizens of a free country. And I want to start that discussion with the social media site Facebook.

It begins with my university, Marylhurst. The school has an eclectic, adult centered student base, with an average age of 35 years. Many of the school’s students are returning to college after a long absence spent in the business world. Over half the students are online students that never even set foot on the beautiful campus, and the campus itself, by catering to non traditional students, is primarily a commuter campus with little on site social institutions or activities.

Small wonder, then, that until 2009 there was no campus newspaper, much less student organization.

Recently, some students from the English Literature and Writing department agitated to produce a school newspaper. With the cost of printing being prohibitive, however, the paper, which launched in January, is web only, consisting of about 5-6 articles per month and published on a proprietary system with limited graphic capabilities. It is uncertain how many individuals actually know that the Marylhurst Messenger, as the virtual paper is know, even exists. The semi-independent publication is not even mentioned on the university’s web site, nor on its online learning intraweb. My point is not to degrade the effort of students to put together such a publication. It is a noble pursuit and no doubt a worthy outlet for writing students to produce work for. Rather, the point is that, like all newspapers and their associated web site mirrors, the Messenger has limitations that are inherent to its structure. A newspaper — paper or virtual — places hierarchy, structure, and format first, and delivery of content and facilitation of discourse second.

Meanwhile, in Spring 2009, after a protracted absence, the university launched its own Facebook page. Marylhurst students and alumni with Facebook profiles immediately began to link to the page by becoming fans of it, thus driving increasing amounts of traffic to it. Just over a month after being created, the page now has 226 fans. Updates about current events on campus, student achievements, and the like are constantly provided, filtering into the “feed” on the home page of those fans. And those fans are talking back, commenting on posts, and engaging in discussions with each other in a forum tab on the Marylhurst page.

Questions about the future of journalism or the future or newspapers are often the subject of debate these days, but what debaters often forget is that newspapers (and journalism in general) are only tools to achieve an end: disseminating information and facilitating public discourse. Viewed through this lens, Facebook pages become a far more natural tool for building community and spreading stories than a newspaper — or even a web page made to mimic a newspaper — ever could.

Social media sites like Facebook are far from perfect, but they have a fundamentally different structure that makes them far more suited to carrying out the duties that traditional journalism has for the last century and a half. Discourse is far easier when communication is two way, and giving every person the power to wear the journalist’s hat means that instead of one or two or ten journalists covering a beat, there are as many as there are readers. Indeed, Marylhurst has made the permissions on their page broadly open: “You may have noticed that we left permissions as wide open as possible. This is intentional, as we encourage YOU – students, faculty and staff – to contribute content. Some of you are already doing just that.” The university is taking advantage of the more democratic orientation of Facebook’s capabilities to enable average students — the citizens of the school — to take on the duties that a journalist would once have bore. Not to support the conversion of an old media giant into a new media world. Not to drive bottom lines and salvage a company from red ink. Not to satisfy the needs of advertisers. Rather, the intention is to disseminate information about the Marylhurst community, and to stir that community to engage in discourse.

Today we face a world where journalistic duties are now decentralized, and become merely another part of the duties of an engaged citizenry — or in this case an engaged student body. This suggests that the discourse about the future of journalism — especially discourse aimed at how professional journalists and media outlets can adapt to the new environment — is a distraction. What we really need to be debating is how the best aspects of old journalism — quality writing, analytical ability, and ethical conduct — can be Incorporated into a new discipline of citizen education that focuses on engaging in public discourse on the web as well as in person. What we are studying here is not the future of journalism, it is the future of citizenship. When we stop debating how laid off journalists can build a community of readers around themselves, and instead begin to discuss how every citizen can incorporate the best of what journalism offered into their civic toolkit, then we will truly be debating the future of online journalism.