The age of ‘prosumers’
Rosenstiel advocates changes in journalists’ roles
By Carolyn Farr

Tom Rosenstiel makes a point during a visit to one of the School's reporting clases.

When it comes to news, America has become the land of the “prosumer,” author and media critic Tom Rosenstiel told students, journalists and scholars at CU-Boulder on April 26.

Rosenstiel described a prosumer as a person who not only consumes news media but also produces it through various media outlets.

“Americans are acquiring more power over the news. Today, people can become their own editors. They can ‘Google’ a topic and selectively choose what they read.”

Rosenstiel argued that journalism also has changed in that it is now a “journalism of assertion.” Any individual can feasibly go on a cable show and assert anything, without any facts, he said, using online commentator Matt Drudge as an example.

He spoke of how difficult it is for today’s consumers to choose from which media outlets to obtain their news. He used the abundance of roadside fast-food restaurants as an analogy.

“How do we dine out without becoming obesely stupid?” he asked.

Rosenstiel offered suggestions for moving journalism into a new direction. First, the traditional gatekeeper role of a journalist should be modernized. A “referee,” he said, is a better term for this new role. A journalist should not be afraid to write about and attempt to explain false rumors that are circulating in the media. A journalist, he said, should contextualize facts in this complicated media world.

“Create a new kind of relationship with your audience,” he said.

His second suggestion was to make journalism more transparent and less convoluted. Rosenstiel said journalists should not write around what they do not know but instead be more upfront with their writing.

He also recommended that journalists distinguish themselves from the other “media garbage.”

When there are so many other media outlets advertising themselves to the public, it is important, he said, to market journalism as something of value.

“Don’t presume our work speaks for itself,” he said.

His final and most substantial proposal was to “achieve a new proactivity about protecting the standards of journalism” through random checks for plagiarism, creating quality-control systems and expanding the ombudsmen’s role.

In introductory remarks, Dean Paul Voakes noted that that he was once the city editor supervising a very young and eager Rosenstiel at the Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto, Calif. Rosenstiel went on to the Los Angeles Times as a Washington, D.C., correspondent, national correspondent and financial writer. He was media critic for the Times from 1983 until 1995. He then served as the chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek for a year and, in 1996 and 1997, was a media critic for MSNBC.

Rosenstiel directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which recently published the comprehensive new study “The State of the News Media 2004.” He is also the vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, which is “a consortium of reporters, editors, producers, publishers, owners and academics worried about the future of the profession,” according to the organization’s Web site, www.journalism.org.

Rosenstiel also co-authored two books. The first, “The Elements of Journalism,” is one of the texts used by the School. The other book is titled “Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media."