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The book is about how the proliferation of grassroots internet journalists (bloggers) has changed the way news is handled. One of the book's main points is that a few big media corporations cannot control the news we get any longer, now that news is being published in real-time, available to everybody, via the Internet. The book received widespread praise from the demographic it covered, and mixed reviews elsewhere. OverviewChapter 1: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond Chapter 2: The Read-Write Web Chapter 3: The Gates Come Down Chapter 4: Newsmakers Turn the Tables Chapter 5: The Consent of the Governed Chapter 6: Professional Journalists Join the Conversation Chapter 7: The Former Audience Joins the Party Chapter 8: Next Steps Chapter 9: Trolls, Spin, and the Boundaries of Trust Chapter 10: Here Come the Judges (and Lawyers) Chapter 11: The Empires Strike Back Chapter 12: Making Our Own News
The citizen journalistA central concept in We the Media is that of citizen journalists – those members of the “former audience” who can now play an active role in news production. This section describes Gillmor's views of citizenship and of journalism in the networked public sphere by comparing them to those of Yochai Benkler in "The Wealth of Networks".
What kind of citizen?The post-war notion of a passive and private citizenship has come under attack since the 1990s on two fronts: the need for a shared identity in increasingly diverse societies, and the existence of citizenship responsibilities and virtues like political participation (Kymlicka and Norman 1994). In We the Media Gillmor is concerned primarily with the latter; he focuses, like Benkler, on participatory citizenship. This leaves the first set of questions about shared experience, identity and social cohesion unaddressed. Who are the citizen journalists represented in the networked public sphere? What are they citizens of, and who do they report for? For instance, Benkler claims that the Internet allows individuals “possessing completely different endowments of material, intellectual, social, and formal ties and capabilities be citizens of the same democratic polity,” as in “the idealized Athenian agora or New England town hall” (181). But in our non-ideal world several groups are marginalized, and while the new media platform includes some by erasing prejudice (e.g. women, ethnic minorities) and distance (Aboriginal peoples), it leaves disadvantaged ones on the other side of the digital divide. Similarly, because citizen journalists can identify and blog with virtually anyone from their neighbors to foreigners, the meaning of membership changes. Participation can still be linked to a polity, but it is no longer limited to a single one.
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