The 'almost-journalists' making a difference in online media

Advocate journalists who provide coverage with a clearly-stated worldview are an overlooked and essential element of the digital media landscape, argues Dan Gillmor, a professor of practice at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Organizations like Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cato Institute are doing serious, valuable reporting about some of the key issues of our time, writes Gillmor in a Future Tense article for Slate magazine.

Gillmor’s article is a response to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 “State of the News Media” report, which optimistically highlighted the proliferation of high-quality, native, digital news from startups and new initiatives at traditional media companies.

Gillmor doesn’t argue that advocate journalists, which he previously termed “almost-journalists” – a label he is rethinking – are producing traditionally objective journalism. “Rather, they’re going deeper than anyone else on topics that they care about that are vital for the public to understand, but which traditional journalists have either ignored or treated shallowly. Then they’re telling us what they’ve learned, using the tools and techniques of 21st-century media.”

Gillmor applauds the power of digital media to remove the traditional-media gatekeepers that used to intercede between advocacy groups and the public. Before the Internet, advocates created detailed reports for media companies based on traditional research, and hoped for the best in terms of coverage and accuracy. In the age of the Internet, these organizations “can make their own media directly available to the public. Everyone with a website is a publisher; we are all media organizations today.”

To learn more about advocate journalism and specific examples of high-quality coverage from advocacy groups, read the full article at Future Tense.

Future Tense is a collaboration among ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine that explores how emerging technologies affect policy and society. The New America Foundation publishes its own “almost-journalism” every week at Weekly Wonk.