By Lara Levin
Student Writer

In celebration of the launch of Reportingonhealth.org, a new Web 2.0 professional education project of USC Annenberg’s California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, incoming professor Henry Jenkins (pictured) delivered an inaugural keynote address on March 24 about the implications of a participatory culture for journalists reporting on health and science news. 

Jenkins began his talk by discussing the role of citizen journalists, a group whose very name is apt to spark controversy and carry a connotation of ambiguity and opposition.

“One of the things that’s striking to me about any metaphor, any analogy—it helps us see some things clearly and some things less clearly,” said Jenkins, recently announced as a new Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at the Annenberg Program of Online Communities. He will join the USC Annenberg faculty in July 2009.

He said the emergence of citizen journalism has led to a blurring of the lines between the amateur and the professional. According to Jenkins, the very rhetoric of citizen journalism lends itself to pitting the amateur and professional against one another and that the two groups occupy the same journalistic space. Jenkins recommends, rather, that the work of citizen journalists act as a supplement to that of their professional counterparts.

The synergetic journalistic efforts of these two groups thus form what Jenkins refers to as civic, or public, media—not a media publicly funded or fueled by public interests, but one that inspires public interest and conversation. Jenkins sees this collaborative effort as one that “takes all these new media platforms and applies them to spark all of these public conversations” that have emerged with the movement into the realm of Web 2.0. This age of diverse, plentiful and readily available information coupled with the ability to maintain current relationships and reconnect with individuals through social networks, Jenkins suggests, has also contributed to a heightened level of engagement with media and the conversational topics it inspires.

Jenkins continued, however, that this increasingly engaged and participatory public has, among many others, a striking implication — the questioning of the notion of the expert.

“We are living in a world of collective intelligence where all of us know something,” Jenkins said. “This is no longer a society in which experts are able to withhold their knowledge from the public.”

As the public begins to access and discuss highly specialized information, however, Jenkins notes the need for the development of public “literacies,” defined as sufficient levels of understanding needed for individuals to fully participate in the discourse of a specific topic. The task of establishing these literacies, Jenkins proposed, will be assigned to professional journalists, especially in the areas of health and science.

Jenkins predicted that the future of health and science journalism lies in acting as a bridge between the medical and scientific communities and the public, creating these “literacies” and mutual understanding that will not only spark public interest in the topics but will lead to an informed and educated engagement of the two groups.

“Journalists are particularly suited to be honest brokers between the medical profession still bound within the notion of the expert and the public who are engaged in a participatory culture,” Jenkins said.

He said this role of an honest broker of information is one in which journalists have long thrived. However, the participatory culture fostered by Web 2.0 poses this additional challenge of effectively communicating to publics and engaging them with health and science professionals. Journalists must not only create “literacies,” but they must also be well-versed and literate in the topics of health and science, often bogged down with amplified nuance and specialization. It is the hope of Jenkins as well as the site’s creators that Reportingonhealth.org will create this sense of literacy, facilitating the discourse and treatment of health issues in our society.

Reportingonhealth.org
More on Jenkins
Jenkins to join USC Annenberg faculty in July 2009