Journalism without journalists
It looks like an oxymoronic statement, but this is what the non-governmental organization City Bureau, from Chicago, in the United States, is testing through a program called Documenters aimed at training ordinary people in producing reports about public open meetings and gatherings, either private or governmental.
The project seeks to intensify coverage of local events of public interest but may have long-term consequences that could lead to the transformation of the journalist from a prospector of facts and craftsman of the news into a professional news curator and tutor. According to North American researcher Victor Pickard, this could accelerate the implementation of a new structure for the practice of journalism, replacing commercial motivation with a focus on public interest.
Documenters seek to restore the relationship between professional journalists and the public, distorted over the years by the process of distancing between newsrooms and audiences, which ended up causing record levels of mistrust in the press. City Bureau is based on the idea that ordinary people will be the main producers and selectors of news, while journalists will have the complex task of checking veracity, contextualizing facts, and suggesting editorial standards.
The objective of Documenters is to encourage the involvement of residents in the discussion of municipal problems and the production of information flows aimed primarily at the Hispanic, black population and European and Asian immigrants. The project was launched in 2018 in Chicago and has since been expanded to seven other North American cities through partnerships with local journalistic projects. Participants dedicate part-time to producing reports, have a variety of professions and receive training and payment for work performed.
Several international researchers are closely monitoring the City Bureau’s experience as it tends to open space for the institutionalization of so-called Community Information Centers (CIC), a type of municipal organization already existing in some North American cities and that seeks to coordinate local communication strategies, ranging from hyperlocal newspapers to reading clubs.
The new institutionalization of journalism
The first CICs emerged in 2020 in the United States, under the name of Community Information Cooperatives, to address the information chaos in poor communities during the Covid 19 pandemic in states on the North American east coast. The idea later gave rise to the creation of Information Districts, an instance that also included city halls.
The set of these experiences seems to indicate the growth of a trend towards a new institutionalization of journalism. The main researchers of journalism in the digital era, such as North Americans Victor Pickard, Damian Radcliff and Penelope Abernathy, believe that we are moving towards a predominantly public system where professionals will have the main function of advising the community in the production of local news flows.
This, eventually, means a deinstitutionalization of journalism, that is, the replacement of the current structures of professional activity by a new type of organization whose main characteristic would be the link to community interests instead of commercial concerns, present in most traditional press bodies. This is a change whose profile is still quite vague, but there is a wide consensus that the main journalistic institution won’t be the press, in today's format, because large corporations became unviable due to the loss of commercial value of the news.
Other possibilities under discussion in journalistic and academic circles are related to financing local and independent journalistic projects, currently threatened by the syndrome of lack of sustainability. This problem could be partially resolved through a municipal tax to be collected by city halls but managed by information districts elected directly by the community. The resources would then be distributed to Community Information Centers, elected and staffed by professional journalists and people trained in projects such as Documenters.
But all these proposals and studies are based on a change in the information behaviour of readers, listeners, viewers and internet users. From passive receivers or mere spectators of the information flow, people are now, increasingly, becoming active agents in the production of news.
