Here is background from Rosen:

Let’s find out what the printed newspaper on the local level has been able to deliver recently, so we know in rough, round terms what we have to replace.

Tip from Bloggasm.

Rosen’s magic fact is built on: The falling costs of people with the same interests to meet each other, share information, collaborate and publish what they know.

Twitter is his giant tipster network. He has 12,599 followers and that’s growing by the minute. The ideal now is to have a blog and a Twitter feed. See and hear it all here in about 10 minutes:

Who would have thought that a public journalism scholar, now a citizen media scholar could sit on a panel that commands a $75 ticket? Check out: Journalists and Social Media: Sources, Skills, and the Writer: A panel discussion with Jay Rosen (NYU), Shirley Brady (Businessweek), and Andy Carvin (NPR).

Of course, this has a deeper meaning. If the stars in the free-content movement can command high speaking fees and then residuals from videos edited from their talks, then maybe you will see less of them for free.

Is this the beginning of the end of free high quality information? After all Jay has always been at the vanguard of media reform and change. Apparently it is not the beginning of paying people who produce the content…see Jay’s comment below. He isn’t getting paid, only MediaBistro is charging.

One more thought. A long time ago when I was editor of Minnesota Monthly Magazine, which is a for-profit enterprise owned by the nonprofit Minnesota Public Radio, I ran a piece about how much Minnesota speakers were getting paid. In the piece we mentioned that Garrison Keillor charged some enormous figure, I think it was $10,000. Keillor blew a gasket because he said he often speaks to small groups for free and worried that some church lady now might not feel comfortable in asking him to speak.

So maybe Jay Rosen will blow a gasket too. Any how, if you like what you hear for $75, you might want to check out the free video (at least for now) of Jay here at PJNet.org.

Important Update: Read Jay Rosen’s comment. Apparently MediaBistro took it upon themselves to charge for the event without Rosen knowing it and without paying him any fee either.

Through Friday, of 270 news articles published in The Times about the election since the national tickets were formed in late August, only 29, or a little over 10 percent, were primarily about policy substance. And that is a generous tally that includes some very brief items.

That count by my assistant, Michael McElroy, is similar to figures compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has been closely monitoring election coverage in a wide range of media. The group found that only 8 percent of front-page articles in The Times from late August through last Sunday were about policy. Nearly three-quarters were about the horse race, political tactics, polls and the like. The Times numbers are about the same as for the news media in general, including cable television and blogs — not a standard to aspire to.

Apparently, that does not make the public happy; Hoyt writes:

Early this year, roughly three-quarters of voters of all political persuasions surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said they wanted more coverage of the candidates’ stands on issues. For the most part, they were disappointed, and their satisfaction with the news media has declined, according to Pew. In February, 55 percent said the election coverage was good or excellent. By June, 54 percent said it was fair or poor.

Those interested in civic and public journalism have been taking on this issue since the public journalism reform movement began  after the 1988 presidential election. Jay Rosen has been one of the most informed critics. Here is what he said back in January, 2008. Here is what I wrote in October 2007 and if you want to keep going back, here is Rosen again in 2004 with his PressThink piece Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race. Forever!

If I were surveyed, I would answer that I want more issue oriented stories. However, here is a confession: I can’t help myself, apparently like a lot of political junkies, each day I visit places like FiveThirtyEight.com which provides fantastic horse race coverage, just like inside baseball. It is addictive. Here is what FiveThirtyEight posted last week about the site’s audience growth:

Seven months ago today this site … went live, with 80 visits. Yesterday we reached 693,216 … Glancing at the daily circulation figures for US newspapers, it looks like we’re at or about the top ten and rising with a bullet.

So for me I want my polls and my substantial reporting too. Right now we are obviously getting more of the former and too little of the latter and that is the big problem now, has been the problem in the past and will probably be the problem forever.

You can see the video here and his notes and other comments here at PressThink.

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

As you probably know Rosen was one of the founders of the Public Journalism movement. I just finished writing a book review of The Pursuit of Public Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism by Tanni Haas. The review will be published eventually in the International Journal of Press/Politics.

Haas writes that public journalism’s:

…founding scholarly and journalistic advocates — Rosen included — have arguably failed to clearly articulate public journalism as a journalistic philosophy in its own right.

So Jay, is this definition the first step in clearly articulating citizen journalism as a journalistic philosophy in its own right? It would be nice.

By the way as I pointed out in a comment at Rosen’s site: Type in the URL citizenjournalism.org and see who owns it. Go ahead type it in now, I will see you back here in a couple of seconds.

Also in an earlier response to Jeff Jarvis, who was promoting “networked journalism” and wanting to kill off the phrase “citizen journalism,” I wrote:

I like the networked journalism concept, but to me the phrase networked journalism is a cop out, a phrase used to offend no one…

When we founded the Public Journalism Network, I did not want us to give up the name public journalism, even though, it was a hot button issue and had lots of baggage….

I also pushed for the former AEJMC Civic Journalism Interest Group to become the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group.

If we remove the words citizen, public, civic from the equation, it will be too easy to forget that this is about public, civic, citizen participation. This is not just about helping news operations to get a free staff or even developing better coverage, it’s a way of getting an engaged public to help build a bigger, better and stronger democracy.

If the ABC News Presidential Primary debate debacle had happened back then, people like David Brooks and George Stephanopoulos with their now totally neanderthal view of quality news and information, would have had the megaphone and totally trumped any criticism and put the Public Journalism people on the defensive. The movement had the right ideas, but lacked the DNA to make them heard and happen. In a figurative sense public journalism lacked the equivalent of thumbs. But alas it has the thumbs now.

In 2004 I wrote:

The new weblog-infused DNA makes public journalism more nimble and provides it with figurative set of thumbs. It allows public journalism to grasp and do things impossible in the old public journalism… We want to ensure that the … spin doctors do not control our elections..

I do believe if there are any spin doctors out there today thinking like Brooks did in his New York Times column, they are in big trouble. Brooks wrote:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. 

This week, some 20 years after the first protests about this inane, neanderthal type of journalism, the spin doctors, Stephanopoulos and Brooks have learned that the people have their own megaphones and that the once struggling public journalism has evolved into the public’s journalism and its new thumbs cannot only grasp, but when push comes to shove, they can gouge.

…citizen journalists do not brand their voice with the impersonal corporate voice. They brand their voices with themselves and others as individual persons. Citizen journalists do not have bosses that can censor their work. They can publish what they want when they want to whom they want, without the editorial control of any corporation. Citizen journalists do not have corporate clients or individual customers. To the extent that citizen journalists seek fame or fortune, they derive it from the direct contributions of the public.

He finishes saying:

Citizen journalism, with its fierce independence, is well suited to report on public opinion, especially when it disagrees with corporate attempts to maximize private profits.

It’s a very interesting way of thinking of citizen journalists. You have fully trained professionals working outside of the organized corporate world. In the mainstream media, you would have professional corporate journalists who work first and foremost for a company as most do now.

So now, the questions: How can these highly trained citizen professionals make a living outside the corporate environment? Would the news they produce be substantially different from the corporate pros? Would it be better, worse  or just different? Would we be better off with one, the other or both?   

That’s excellent point number one, excellent point number two for me is that the media’s so called experts are not really experts at all. Here is one example:

The current generation of political reporters has based its bid for election-year authority on its horse race and handicapping skills. But reporters actually have no such skills. Think: what does a Howard Fineman (Newsweek, MSNBC) know about politics in America? I mean, what would you logically turn to him for? It’s got to be: Who’s ahead, what’s the strategy, and how are the insiders sizing up the contest? That’s supposedly his expertise, if he has any expertise; and if he doesn’t have any expertise, then what is he doing on my television screen, night after night, talking about politics?

Even if Fineman and company had it, the ability to handicap the race is a pretty bogus skill set. Who cares if you are good at anticipating events that will unroll in clear fashion without you? Why do we need people who know how this is going to play out in South Carolina when we can just wait for the voters to play it out themselves?

Then Rosen adds:

 Among the “bogus narratives” the campaign press has developed so far, the Politico editors chose three to illustrate their humiliation. John McCain’s “collapse” in the summer of 2007, which meant we could write him off; Mike Huckabee’s win in Iowa, where the candidate without an organization took a state where electoral success, we were assured, was all about organization; and Obama’s “change the tone in politics” campaign which, according to the Gang, was not going to be in tune with the voters’ rawer, more partisan feelings in ‘08. All three were a bust, suggesting political journalists have no special insight into: How is this going to play out? What they have are cheap, portable routines in which you ask that kind of question, and try to get ahead of the race. This, too, is what I mean by mindlessness.

Rosen also picks up on this Nation piece by Christopher Hayes:

WHY CAMPAIGN COVERAGE SO OFTEN SUCKS.” He starts with something that is known to everyone in the pack: Campaign reporting is an essay in fear.

“Reporting at events like this is exciting and invigorating, but it’s also terrifying. I’ve done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn’t know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It’s daunting and the whole time you think: ‘Am I missing something? What’s going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat.’ You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions.”

Whereas he had once thought of it as a rookie’s experience, this year he learned that the fear never goes away. “Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It’s like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was.”

 I looked Hayes’ short piece and here is the key to what he says is needed:

You need to deal with the structural issues that reinforce these tendencies.

Rosen nails it when he writes the central problem is that the politcal journalists’ primary question is “Who is going to win?” The whole premise, as the New Hampshire debacle proves, is flawed; it is a horse-race question to which none of them have an accurate answer.

Instead Rosen writes:

… the job of the campaign press is not to preempt the voters’ decision by asking endlessly, and predicting constantly, who’s going to win. The job is to make certain that what needs to be discussed will be discussed in time to make a difference – and then report on that.