“Hell yes, this is advocacy journalism, and we’re doing advocacy journalism all the time”

I just watched this archived talk from September 2013 from Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s center for Civic Media.

Zuckerman is smart about a lot of things. Today, I especially enjoyed the last section of this 15-minute talk, when he talks about:

• news judgment and accompanying responsibilities
• encouraging the right kind of civic action
• reaching a new generation of media consumers with impact-oriented messages

He says:

What we can’t keep doing is building news that is disconnected from peoples’ ability to have an impact. We can’t continue to say, “We’re going to put this information out here, you’re going to be an informed citizen, and then something will happen and it’s all going to work out from there.”

Ethan Zuckerman from Nieman Foundation on Vimeo.