Events

20 July 2010

The end(s) of journalism: The beginning and ends of journalism

Lecture

First Winter Lecture by Dr Geoff Kemp, Department of Political Studies, The University of Auckland.

Chair: Professor John Morrow, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), The University of Auckland.

This lecture returns to the roots of journalism to illuminate its present predicament and prospects. It starts at the beginning, exploring the origins of journalism and the periodical press in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It reflects on the relationship between practice and theory - the generation of ideas justifying journalism’s role - and between this and broader processes of change in medium and markets. The first points to a legacy of ideas about the ends of journalism; the second points to the difficulties of meeting those ends in imperfect and shifting conditions. The vogue for Jurgen Habermas’s grand theory of the emergence of a democratic public sphere is considered as a setting for this story, along with R.W.T. Martin’s distinction of 'free press' and 'open press'. The story reaches the nineteenth century with journalism as an articulation of the public - a self-aware body with a critical voice, an institution free more than open, re-imagined as 'the press' and the 'fourth estate'. The scene then shifts to industrial chaos in the media as the twenty-first century nears, journalism’s bodily integrity broken on the wheel of technological and economic transformation, the parts picked over by tweeters and bloggers, a babel not a public. But the body called journalism can never die, says Michael Schudson, society needs it too much. Is this the story that history tells?