Modul Mata Kuliah Journalisme Online - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

“I can’t believe the argument that the citizen should not be part of journalism. It means you don’t trust
your public”
Charlie Beckett
Panelists
Andrew Keen, author
Charlie Beckett, Founding Director, POLIS
Dr Andrew Calcutt, Principal Lecturer in Creative Industries and Cultural Studies and Programme Leader,
MA Journalism and Society, School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East
London
Chair
Claire Fox, director, Institute of Ideas
Overviews
Charlie Beckett The news media is for what it always was for. It can be a watchdog, informer, educator,
entertainer, campaigner, profit-maker or forum. Journalism in ‘professional’ or ‘amateur’ form can be a
force for good or ill. There is nothing immutable or inevitable about news media. But new technologies
combined with changing social and economic forces open up the possibilities (and threats) of new
communications systems and processes. By embracing a more connected and open form of news media
that encourages public participation I believe that journalism can enhance and transform itself as a
practice and as a part of the public discourse and political activity.
Andrew Keen The purpose of the media is to inform people what is happening in both their own
countries and the world. This is the foundation for creating a responsible citizenship and is one of the
great challenges in western democracies, where we increasingly regard citizenship in terms of selfexpression
rather than self-knowledge.
Andrew Calcutt Media (plural) are for more than one thing. But plurality does not exclude priority – nor
should it. As media professionals, we should take the lead in establishing the primary purpose of media.
Partly because we professionals have failed to take a strong lead, in the recent period media have
tended to become the means through which many people make a spectacle of themselves. In usergenerated-content,
non-professionals upload themselves as wares for others to share; meanwhile we
media people are often ready to drop the cogito and adapt our professionalism to the principle of
manifesto ergo sum.
Not all these developments are negative, since they represent an attempt to continue the social by
means other than the political. But they are a weak attempt upon a substantial task, and we
professionals are culpable if we allow others to invest themselves in something so insufficient. Instead,
we should champion objectivity as the essential counterpart to human history-making subjectivity. Not
the ‘objectivity’ from which the majority were excluded, but the collaborative and contentious process
of making the world as reproduced in human knowledge of it, correspond to the world which only we