The new year brings loads of ‘top 10’ lists, trend analyses, and other retrospectives to the mediasphere. One of particular interest can be found on the weblog PressThink (a blog about journalism). This list is author Jay Rosen’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004 for journalism.
I was particularly struck by idea number 5: ”News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation,” because of its parallels to arts marketing, education, outreach, and development. Says Rosen about the public and the media:
The shift in power is putting more tools, more choices, more media capacity overall in the hands of the people formerly known as the audience. The decline in authority goes hand in hand with that, since people who have lots of choices, who can “roll their own” (as Dan Gillmor says) don’t care to be lectured to. Just by staying the same news sounds today more like a lecture because it gets compared to stuff that doesn’t sound that way at all.You know sometimes a crisis in authority is tonal. The answer to that is a shift in tone.
The ‘lecture’ tone is pervasive in the nonprofit arts — in our marketing, our communications, our education, even in the words we use to describe those activities, which are so often one-directional (presenting, producing, outreach, etc.).
It will be interesting to see how many arts organizations and arts managers strive for a conversation in their work, rather than a lecture, in 2005.
