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CONCLUSION Reporting and the Public in the Digital Age I n the dead of night on November 30, 2011, protesters affiliated with Occupy Philadelphia—the ideological grandchildren, perhaps, of the anti-globalization activists who stormed the Republican National Convention in 2000 with their protest banners and digital cameras—were evicted from Dilworth Plaza. Reporters with the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer were on the scene, transmitting developments to Twitter’s live coverage platform Cover It Live. At the same time, the long-dormant Philly IMC had reawakened, providing a raft of participatory media coverage of the protest. Blogs and Twitter feeds sprang into action, some chronicling the midnight expulsion, and others weighing in with trenchant post-event analysis. Across the city, the networked news ecosystem pulsed with life, events translated into digital flows that raced across the Internet (see Figure C.1). From the perspective of a decade, the two journalistic moments that open and close this book—the first citizen media coverage of the protests at the Republican National Convention and the expulsion of activists with Occupy Philadelphia—seem dramatically different. That a dramatic shift in how news coverage is provided to an always connected citizenry has taken place in ten years seems too obvious to even state. Simply look around. We live, it seems, in an information universe that is radically different from that of the year 2000. Along with the explosion of media sources and the ever faster pace of live event coverage, we have seen once powerful news institutions collapse, transform, or both. Everything, it appears, is different now. And yet the story in this book, if it can be said to have one, is a story of stasis. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is the story of a simultaneous vortex of external events and the complete lack of change of any kind. It may be time finally to apologize to my readers: there have been few moments of dramatic revolution in these pages. The story, perhaps, is more truthful: journalistic evolution as a long, slow, hard slog. How can we reconcile these two seemingly incompatible perspectives? Everything seems different, and yet everything remains the same. Part of the explanation, 160 Conclusion I argue, lies in themes that have run like red thread through this volume: the meaning of journalistic reporting, the complex nature of institutions in an era of apparently low-cost networking, and reporters’ vision of “their” public under conditions of digitization. Reporting In the working paper “Making a Case for Open Journalism Now,” Melanie Sill, an executive in residence at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, assembles an impressive list of open, networked journalism experiments, ranging from “digital-first” strategies at the Journal Register Corporation to the “mutualization of news” promoted by the British newspaper The Guardian.1 To this impressive list of projects can be added even newer initiatives, such as the New York University–Guardian newspaper’s “Citizens Agenda” brokered by Professor of Journalism Jay Rosen, and “Pipeline ,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s project on hydrofracking. Lists such as these will certainly continue to expand. Indeed, to read reports like Sill’s is to come away with a sense of a news world in ferment and amid fundamental change. Every time I visited Philadelphia, I arrived expecting to see the kind of brave new journalistic world reflected in Sill’s report. And every time, I left disFIGURE C.1 Philly.com coverage of Occupy Philadelphia from the winter of 2012. (Source: http://www.philly.com.) Reporting and the Public in the Digital Age 161 appointed. It is possible, of course, that my single-site research is an outlier, no matter how comprehensive it might be. But I do not think so. There is no reason to pick on Philadelphia; I would argue that the news ecosystem there is actually more like most emerging digital information networks than it is different. Indeed, I would even go as far as to say that, if one looks inside the larger organizational universes in which many new journalism experiments are embedded, one encounters a similar lack of revolutionary upheaval. Why? And does it matter? For all of the fragmentation of journalism in Philadelphia, a distinct center of gravity remained, and that center was the Inquirer building at 400 North Broad Street. Indeed, one of the most interesting consequences of my ecosystemically oriented research was the fact that it often led me back, in the end, to the traditional...

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