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Community Corner

You Are Gutenberg: Citizen-Journalists Can Make the Difference

Sites like Patch can spark a revolution in journalism education as profound as the printing press.

Newspapers have always wanted to run videos. But in the traditional print media—only 15 years ago, which seems as distant as another world—video was the exclusive province of television. Actually, the convergence of print and broadcast media on the Internet provides both the newspaper and TV business opportunities they have always longed for.

Newspapers always wanted livelier visuals to go with their depth, and TV always wanted more time, so they could add depth to their visuals.

Which brings us to La Mesa Patch, an online newspaper with video capability, which daily welcomes into its pages stories written by citizens, including Local Voices, or bloggers. 

Find out what's happening in La Mesa-Mount Helixwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

A few—not many—of these citizen-producers are journalists by trade. Most of the producers, however, know little about the practice of journalism—for the simple reason that journalism is not a required course in the American educational system. It should be, but it’s not. Less than 1 percent all Americans have had any formal journalism education.

I am going to make a prediction—one based on precedent. You will remember that after Johannes Gutenberg’s introduction of the printing press around 1440, the newfangled contraption spread quickly throughout western Europe. It was faster and cheaper than doing books the old-fashioned way—with pen and ink.

Find out what's happening in La Mesa-Mount Helixwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

It was even more revolutionary to media than the Internet is today. Why? Because most 15th-century citizens, the famed “feudal masses,” had no access to the rare, expensive, handwritten books. Most of the masses couldn’t read.

Then the printed pages started showing up all over—in the shops of the stationers, as booksellers were called.

“What good is this?” says an alderman, holding up the page.  “It looks so . . . so artificial.

“Yes,” concedes the stationer—as the booksellers were called in those days.  “Such work will never equal the art of a friar with his parchment and quills.  But this new ‘printing’ is fast, and cheap.  For the first time, information is readily available to the masses.”

“But,” protests the alderman, “95 percent of the population can’t read.”

 The stationer shrugs. “They will,” he says.

Which brings us back to Patch—including sister sites such as Mount Helix Patch. I predict that, over time, papers like La Mesa Patch will create a spike in journalism education among the masses.

The alderman says, “Ninety-nine percent of the population has no journalism education.”

The Patch editor shrugs. “They will,” he says.

Why? Because journalism organizes information in a way that makes it easy for the reader to get the news. In school, Americans learn to write stories that begin at the beginning. In journalism school, students learn to write stories that begin at the end.

That is the key to the phenomenal success of newspapers over the past 500 years. Readers learned they didn’t have to read 30 paragraphs to find out what happened. They could read just the first paragraph, or the first three, or first five, and then, knowing they had the most important information about the story, go to the next one.

That same easy access will come more into demand at newspapers like Patch, compelling citizen-producers, even of personal content like blogs, to learn how to give the readers (and the editors) what they want. This is what we teach in Grossmont’s journalism classes, and in the converged print-television world, we teach it for both print and broadcast.

In our cross-media journalism track, students learn to write stories that begin at the end for both print and broadcast, and to present the stories in both mediums, and they learn to operate cameras, audio, and editing equipment, to go into the field and collect the necessary content for the video story, and then report it and edit it.

When someone knows how to do that, a citizen-producer becomes a citizen-journalist, prepared to energize the pages of La Mesa Patch, or any other online newspaper around the world.

This is not a plug. It is just recognition of a new demand, to which we in journalism education have already begun to respond.

Readers of La Mesa Patch already know that, on any given day, most of the stories here are provided by La Mesans. You also already know that Patch loves to run visuals with its stories—photos.

But even better—videos.

Editor’s note: Videos that meet Patch Terms of Use can be added to any story in Patch. They also can be uploaded to any Announcement or Events calendar item. Just register with your desired Patch site—13 in San Diego County alone.

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