SUMMIT

Changing Newsrooms, Redefining
Journalism:
New ‘Mediagogy for the Oppressed’
Saed Jamal Abu-Hijleh
New advancements in Informaon and Communicaons Technologies (ICTs) are dramacally
changing the media landscape. Major developments in the electronic media are
occurring at unprecedented rate creang new interconnected plaorms that offer wider
public parcipaon. An ongoing revoluon in digital technologies is radically altering
paerns of news producon and consumpon on the local, regional, and internaonal
levels.
The Internet has been transformed into a mul-layered and interconnected media
plaorm facilitang beer flow of informaon and enhanced sharing of content in different
formats. The Internet developed from a medium that allowed the interacon between
one-to-one, then one-to-many, and now many-to-many. Web 2.0 is the term used to
describe the development in the World Wide Web infrastructure and web-design soware
that led to the evoluon of web-based communies. These developments resulted in a
massive increase in User-Generated Content (UGC) on the internet that can be found on
weblogs, newsgroups, mailing lists, bullen boards, chat forums, and independent news
websites.
Accordingly, new forms of parcipatory journalism have emerged expressed in an explosion
in the number of blogs and cizens’ journalism 1 websites that started to challenge the
monopoly and hegemony of mainstream media on, what I call, news producon assembly
lines, and to challenge the ability of the big media conglomerates to set the global news
agendas determiniscally as has been the case for many years in the past.
These changes are creang more opportunies for broader parcipaon from marginalized
and colonized communies around the world. More space is available for these
communies to report on unreported, misreported, or underreported news in their locali-
es.
Since mass media, especially the news media, has always been used in the process of the
reproducon of oppressive socioeconomic and sociopolical orders by serving the
interest of the elites in society, the disenfranchised people around the world must ulise
these changes in media landscapes and plaorms to parcipate more in the newsproduc-
on assembly lines. What is needed is what I dare to call a new ‘Mediagogy of the
Oppressed’ .
1
Many argue that the term “cizens’ journalism” should be replaced with terms like “grassroots journalism”,
“people’sjournalism”, or “parcipatory journalism”, since there are millions around the world who are considered
stateless or without cizenship (like refugees or illegal immigrants).
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