Joseph Piasecki

I felt a little like I was back at St. Ignatius High School as I listened to Michael Parks' Thursday afternoon lecture -- particularly the part about journalists' responsibility to improve society. Aside from the momentary Latin translation flashback, it fired me up.

After two weeks of examining paradigm shifts and throwing some fundamental industry assumptions out the window, confirmation of the notion that we're in this business to make the world a better place (a goal Jesuit thinkers and teachers tend to drill into you as the meaning of life) brought a lot of things back into focus for me.

One was the conversation about ethics -- whether accountability should be an internal, common sense process coming from the gut or a more discursive logic developed through discussion and reasoning. While we discussed these positions as alternatives, with the discursive notion reaching more into the theoretical than the practical, I understood through the Jesuit-trained Parks' words that the two philosophies are not mutually exclusive.

As Professor Suro had explained in class that morning, on one side we have an ascribed notion of our first amendment rights -- basically, that the First Amendment frees the individual of constraint (affirmed by Miami Herald Vs. Tornillo). On the other side of the spectrum (as laid out in Red Lion vs. FCC), the First is in place to ensure society's rights to information access necessary for self-governance -- in other words, a protection meant to sustain free public discourse.

I take both of them, and here's why: Journalism is both a right and a privelege, and maybe a right because it's a privilege. Or, as Prof. Parks succinctly put it: "The reason we have First Amendment rights is we have First Amendment responsibilities." 

Thus the modest task that is our charge -- including Parks assertions that, as specialists, we widen our points of view rather than narrow them, even and especially if that calls for eliminating the more common narrative "scripts" of mainstream journalism -- is to increase public understanding, especially of forms of injustice.

And in an increasingly information overloaded world, the new value of newspapers relies on the depth of interpretation and analysis in their content, asserted Parks. People read us to be smarter, he said, and I would add that better-informed people make better-informed decisions. 

So, it's not just about the how of our jobs, but the why to which we're ultimately publicly accountable.  

As a member of the alternative press for eight years as a staff writer and deputy editor for the Pasadena Weekly (associate editor since I started Annenberg's Specialized Journalism Program), the broader topics of what makes good journalism have reminded me of the continual struggle of alternative newsweeklies and our trade association to define ourselves.

For a long time, alt weeklies were seen as playing a supplemental role of better explaining and contextualizing mainstream journalism and its coverage of events.

My experience at the Weekly showed me that alt papers can do so much more. We break news. We localize topics of broad concern. We provide big-picture histories that relate to important happenings in our communities. We can do it all.

We're basically just newspapers, only with a greater luxury of time and flexibility of content choice that demands we offer stories that go beyond basic fact gathering to better explain the news.

Andrew Lih's introduction of Robert Lucky's Information Pyramid (I'm still hunting for a link, so if you have one please send this way) helps explain. At the bottom, there's data and information--basically, the raw, so-called "objective" facts of a given situation. Michael Jackson's in the hospital. Michael Jackson has died.

Then come knowledge and ultimately wisdom: what does it mean that Michael Jackson has died, and why is this important?

As Professor Lih explained, today's news audience is bombarded by so much information from so many sources that many expect the "professional" journalist to do it all: get the facts right and figure out what they mean and why they are important.

Dean Howard Gillman's Tuesday lecture was really a call for all professional media to do just that.

His criticism of journalism's broader shortcomings must be heeded, especially after reading on page 49 of Carnegie's "Journalism's Crisis of Confidence" about a study of young news consumers identified "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart as "the most trusted of the TV anchors among the group that chose the Internet as their top news source, while among the entire group Stewart tied with then-NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and came in ahead of ABC's Peter Jennings and former CBS anchor Dan Rather when asked about who they 'trust the most' to provide 'information about politics and politicians."

When you add all of this up, it goes right back to Vartan Gregorian's "Crisis of Confidence" introduction (p. viii), in which he states: "There are too many new ways now that news is delivered and so much information being communicated that there is an aching need for educated, knowledgeable and ethical journalists ... to help us sort through it all."

So, when it comes to alt weeklies, traditionally tasked with helping people sort through it all - and everybody else - the more immediate identity question is how we can be better journalists. 

After that, maybe the scoreboard will start taking care of itself.