From Inquiry to Academic Writing A Practical Guide, 3rd edition

184 CHAPTER 7 | FRom SummARy To SynTHESiS

rosen’s thesis — that journalism could only be revived by reawak-

ening the civic impulse — is paralleled by robert Putnam’s 2000 book,

Bowling Alone, in which he found that people who sign petitions,

attend public meetings, and participate in religious and social orga-

nizations are more likely to be newspaper readers than those who do

not. “Newspaper readers are older, more educated, and more rooted in

their communities than is the average American,” Putnam writes.

unfortunately for the newspaper business, the traditional idea

of com munity, based mainly on geography, remains as moribund today

as it was when rosen and Putnam were analyzing its pathologies. But

if old-fashioned communities are on the decline, the human impulse to

form communities is not. And the Internet, as it turns out, is an ideal

medium for fostering a new type of community in which people have

never met, and may not even know each other’s real names, but share

certain views and opinions about the way the world works. It’s inter-

esting that rosen has become a leading exponent of journalism tied

to these communities, both through his PressThink blog and through

NewAssignment.net, which fosters collaborations between professional

and citizen journalists.

Attitude First, Facts second

This trend toward online community-building has given us a mediascape

in which many people — especially those most interested in politics

and public affairs — want the news delivered to them in the context of

their attitudes and beliefs. That doesn’t mean they want to be fed a diet

of self-reinforcing agit-prop (although some do). It does mean they see

their news consumption as something that takes place within their com-

munity, to be fit into a preexisting framework of ideas that may be chal-

lenged but that must be acknowledged.

earlier this year John Lloyd, a contributing editor for the Financial

Times, talked about the decline of just-the-facts journalism on Open

Source, a Web-based radio program hosted by the veteran journalist

Christopher Lydon. It has become increasingly difficult, Lloyd said, to

report facts that are not tied to an ideological point of view. The emerg-

ing paradigm, he explained, may be “that you can only get facts through

by attaching them to a very strong left-wing, right-wing, Christian, athe-

ist position. Only then, only if you establish your bona fides within this

particular community, will they be open to facts.”

No less a blogging enthusiast than Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily

Kos, has observed that political blogs are a nonentity in Britain, where

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