The future of journalism in emerging deliberative space

Abstract

The future of journalism will continue unfolding within the ongoing process of globalization, which brings particularly important pressures toward transparency. Within this context, journalism now confronts multiple global audiences with the capacity to fi nd alternative media, compare news accounts with their own experience, and challenge mainstream reports. Through a larger structure of online platforms and networks, ‘professional’ journalism has been placed in dialog with citizens with their own forms of journalism and in juxtaposition to alternative accounts readily available across national borders. Within these networks are embedded the deliberative spaces of democratic life. Among the important sites where this process is playing out is China, where in spite of remarkable strides in economic and social development the likelihood of greater transparency has been brought into question. This is the kind of timely example that suggests to me our need for better concepts and research to understand these changes. Neither authoritarian nor free, in the western dualism, it is more helpful to recast journalism within the spaces opening up at different moments and places, spaces for public deliberation created by fl uid networks of expression that don’t always track national boundaries or traditional distinctions between the political and non-political. In the case study provided by China, the most visible manifestation of this phenomenon was provided by the 2008 Olympics and the infl ux of some 20,000 journalists, whose very presence created an unprecedented pressure for a more expansive journalistic space. According to Victor Cha, Director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University, the Olympics created social change in one of the world’s most rigid systems, change that cannot easily be undone (Cha, 2008). A similar ratcheting up of expectations has been occurring for some time with citizen expression online, where the vast Chinese social networks, online chat forums, and blogosphere have opened new space for public deliberation. Although western reports have often seen blogs as