By JACKIE BORCHARDT
news@columbiamissourian.com

COLUMBIA — In August 2005, the nation was watching Hurricane Katrina. Amid the rush of cable and network news reports, a pair of photos in The New York Times caused quite a stir.

Two photos — people wading through water, pushing shopping carts. Two photos — one group of people black, one group of people white. Two captions: Black people were “looters,” white people were “looking for food.” The press got its knuckles rapped, and for good reason.

For some, the coverage was sensational and overdone. For Xiomara Wallace, 58, the coverage was therapeutic.

After 28 years in New Orleans, Katrina forced Wallace and her family to Lafayette, La., and later to Columbia. In Lafayette, CNN was always on. As Wallace healed, she drifted away from the coverage.

The news helped Wallace and others decide whether to return home. Katrina survivors logged online to read messages from people they knew.

One event, lots of news coverage and as many perceptions of the value of the news.

More media is available than ever before, thanks to the Internet. The shift in technology has shifted the look and feel of journalism.

Ask people if journalism matters and they will tell you it’s still important to them. Whether they read the paper every morning or watch the TV news every night, citizens make journalism a part of their daily lives.

Ask what’s wrong with journalism, and a thousand answers are given.

For years, journalism has suffered waning audiences. Local television broadcasts have fewer than seven minutes of news. Circulation has declined in metro newspapers. Smaller community newspapers have fared better but still lose revenue to less expensive methods of advertising.

Readers are skeptical of their news. Once-loyal consumers claim the news media have lost touch with the public. They say newspapers serve their advertisers better than their communities. If readers or viewers don’t like what’s in their daily newspaper or broadcast, they can go online and read whatever they want.

Blogs threaten the traditional editorial page. Social networking sites dish up the latest personal news on everyone you’ve ever spent five minutes with. Google searches 4,500 news sources around the world, replacing the international correspondent, the gatekeeping editor and neighborhood delivery boy with one click.

With citizen dispatches to blog sites and iReporters sending camera-phone pics to CNN, anyone can be a journalist. The Internet seems limitless, and so do the questions it creates for the future of journalism. Journalism can’t blame Craigslist or Google; the trouble goes deeper.

This weekend the Missouri School of Journalism celebrates its centennial as the world’s first school of journalism. The Columbia Missourian celebrates the same birthday. For 100 years, mid-Missouri and the school have walked side by side. The next 100 years are sure to challenge that relationship, but how?

Media rift

Traditional news media — especially local newspapers — are going to have to find a way to work with new technology, said Mary Nesbitt, managing director of the Readership Institute at Northwestern University.

The institute surveyed readers of 100 newspapers about how they use the newspaper and its affiliated Web site. More than 60 percent of readers had never visited their newspaper’s Web site. Print readers are more engaged with a newspaper than online users are with a Web site.

“There’s an opportunity there for newspaper organizations to really make something of their online presence,” Nesbitt said.

Most often, newspapers use their sites for breaking and updating news and hosting databases of information such as crime reports and government employee salaries. Newspapers have to look at their print and online products as distinctly different creatures with different consumers who have different needs and habits.

“I think people go online for a variety of reasons, one of which is to kill time, another is to look for very specific things and a third is to be connected with other people,” Nesbitt said. “The motivations for going online are somewhat different than what motivates people to go to a newspaper.”

Web experiences tend to be browsing, short-lived affairs. The challenge of identifying each medium’s strengths isn’t so straightforward. Technology changes constantly, and news organizations struggle with financial woes, cutting staff and resources to stay afloat.

Even if a newspaper has attractive, useful information, its efforts are lost when not marketed. Advertising has always been part of the newspaper business, but newspapers themselves rarely advertise.

Xiomara Wallace wishes newspapers and magazines revisited their peddling roots.

“Maybe if someone was standing on the street, yelling the headline, people would pay attention,” she said.

Gone is the job of the newspaper boy to put it in your face. Print readers are older, often reading out of loyalty to the brand. Newspapers are keeping these readers despite the continuing decline of readership among young people.

The citizen as journalist

John Hall, 68, thinks of himself as a contributor rather than a blogger.

For years, Hall has published a print newsletter for fans of the post-World War II Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri baseball league. MyMissourian.com, an online publication of the Columbia Missourian, contacted Hall three or four years ago.

Getting most of its content from the everyday citizen, the MyMissourian Web site is an arm of a movement commonly referred to as citizen journalism. Site editors wanted to know if Hall would share his writing and photos with the site. Hall takes photos of rural scenes, flowers, horses, pigs, chickens and so on.

“I send pictures on a regular basis all over the country to certain people,” he said. “And I write little descriptive narratives of the pictures.”

Hall submits 80 to 100 pictures a week to MyMissourian.com. Each submission is edited for spelling and minor errors but has to adhere to only four rules to be accepted: no profanity, no nudity, no personal attacks and no attacks on race, religion, national origin, gender or sexual orientation. Stories and photos on the site are provided by Columbia residents, usually about personal experiences, travel or opinion. A few stories and photos are printed in the Weekend Missourian, which is freely distributed on Saturdays.

Comments on the site are sparse, but Hall gets feedback from e-mail and friends who see his pictures.

In this editorial partnership, journalists hear firsthand about the news that matters to the community. Citizens share with their neighbors, strengthening community and picking up some writing and photo skills along the way.

Nesbitt thinks this partnership won’t erase professional journalists.

“I think we’ll see more contributed content,” she said. “And the role of the professional journalist will be more in the realm of choosing, editing and directing. When citizen journalists and professionals pair up for stories and ideas, the work is supervised and managed and there’s selection and checking at work.”

Lack of fact-checking and editing worries Hall. He said he doesn’t mess much with other blogs but hops around on the Internet for some news.

“I have a hard time putting a lot of stock in anything I see on the Internet that I can’t verify,” Hall said. “I take it with a grain of salt. There’s too much room for it to be fake.”

Citizen journalism is far from professional, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful, said Jan Schaffer from J-Lab at American University’s School of Communication. She calls citizen-based media “small-J” journalism and the traditional news media “big-J” journalism.

Big-J can learn a lot from small-j

“You don’t see bad habits such as conflict framing and scorecard journalism,” Schaffer said. “I think there are some clues in there for what might not be working for citizens.”

Instead of worrying about the business model, big-J should be looking at the journalism model, she said. Citizen media makers care more about building community as opposed to strictly covering community.

For example, a reporter might go to a city council meeting and write a story about what he or she thinks is the highlight of the meeting. A citizen blogger or correspondent at the meeting is more likely to write about the entire meeting’s events, and in chronological order.

Society Shift

It’s not enough to say journalism has changed. Communication has evolved as well.

If you wanted to talk to a friend in 1978, you picked up your home telephone, which was secured to the wall, and dialed the number. Now you don’t need a landline or the wall. Phone technology is decentralized, allowing more people to use it as they wish.

Scientist Andrew Lippman at the MIT Media Lab studies “viral systems,” those that started small with power at the edges and grew and improved as more people picked them up.

Communication has changed, Lippman said, and technology supports it. “Social networks is not a fad,” he said. “There’s been a change in the way people communicate.”

In their most popular forms, social networks such as MySpace and Facebook allow people to define themselves through a personal information page and share that information with others who have pages. Some social networks restrict viewing to only friends, family members or other acquaintances identified by the user. Once connected, people can share messages, pictures, links and more.

One of the Media Lab’s projects, SnapN’Share, takes sharing to the next level. With SnapN’Share, anyone with a cell phone or Blackberry would spread information as they physically walked by someone with another device. There’s one catch: The information exchanged would be filtered by the users’ relationship to one another.

This mirrors real-world communication where, for example, you can be a completely different person around your boss than with your kids.

“How you act and what you reveal is something you can control pretty directly and intuitively,” Lippman said. “When communication is automatic, it’s harder to think about that. What persona do I show this person? What group I am a member of, and deciding who knows that becomes more complicated with the computer.”

He thinks social networks build democracy into the Internet by inserting judgment control and setting the context for appropriate content.

“You sing in the shower by yourself but wouldn’t do it with friends around,” Lippman said. “Social context is an inherent filter on the irrationality of expression normally done totally solo.”

Everyone can be an author on the Internet. Without self-control, there’s a lot of noise as well as information.

What’s next?

Even with the ability to embrace the democracy provided by the Internet, not all news organizations are ready to hop on the innovative journalism bandwagon. Some industry critics are reluctant to adopt citizen journalism and social networking.

“A lot of news organizations say ‘that’s not our job,’” Schaffer said. “Well, OK, then maybe it becomes somebody’s else’s job and that’s fine too, but don’t complain if your job goes away.”

A few years ago, newspapers were pushed to become “hyperlocal,” reporting anything and everything they could about the smallest factions of a community: neighborhood associations, block parties, church committee meetings. The idea: to give readers information they couldn’t get from the national news organizations. Newsroom cutbacks — financial and personnel — limit wannabe-hyperlocal newspapers to covering crime, ordinary information about local problems or other cases where the big news organizations aren’t there for readers, said Schaffer.

“We are finding utility in what citizens can offer, their version of what’s important,” she said. “They don’t subscribe to conventions of mainstream journalism.”

If the news media have a responsibility to listen to citizens, citizens have the responsibility to speak up and be educated.

Media-savvy locals agreed during community dialogues this summer sponsored by the city’s Human Rights Commission, the Columbia Missourian and the Reynolds Journalism Institute — they preached the necessity of an informed and aware community, a feat accomplished by seeking out as much of the truth as possible. Newspapers, magazines, blogs, cable news — nothing is off-limits today, as long as it’s consumed with a discerning eye and rational brain.

Even though Xiomara Wallace reads local and national newspapers, visits online news sites and sifts through magazines at the library, she never feels like she knows enough.

“I need to start looking at the blogs,” she said. “But I need to really sit down and do it.”

A habitual front-to-back-page newspaper reader would want to dig deep into consuming their media, whether it’s an NPR podcast or state political blog.

Readers, just as much as the news media, struggle to take old habits and make them work for new technology.