We're all bus drivers now.

Technology lets us all be bus drivers. This, I am convinced.

In some ways, technology has produced a watered-down version of the news, as Herbert J. Gans suggests in “Democracy and the News”: “Today’s major news websites are near-copies, often abbreviated, of the print and television versions, with added links and archives to serve news buffs wanting more detail. In fact, the Internet provides the most abbreviated news in all the news media, which may help explain why many young people, who are traditionally the least interested in the news, are getting most of their news from the web” (30).

Yes, technology’s apparent ability to appeal to a younger audience is exciting, as is its capacity to provide supplemental information to readers wanting more. But it’s troublesome that, in other ways, in-depth coverage has been traded in for beating one’s competitors, as we saw in the instance of Jason Leopold. The quicker news outlets can get the news to their audiences, the better. However, exchanging speed for accuracy seems to be akin to selling one’s soul to the devil, the outcome of which can never be good for a profession that already seems to be getting short shrift.

Conversely, technology has aided in funneling a wealth of information to readers. In short, technology has given access to readers who were once at the mercy of what newspapers published and television stations broadcasted. The Internet has allowed open source politics to prevail, as we saw in the 2004 campaign. As Dan Gillmor points out in “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People”: Open source politics is about participation—financial as well as on the issues of policy and governance—from people on the edges. People all over the world work on small parts of big open source software projects that create some of the most important and reliable components of the Internet; people everywhere can work on similarly stable components for a participatory political life in much more efficient ways than in the past” (100). In the 2004 election, technology allowed people to put into action their political leanings, perhaps for the first time in a long time—maybe ever. Indeed, this participatory aspect of technology is, to me, the most exciting part of all.

Ethically, I’d say journalists dramatically improved their lot by this change in coverage. Gillmor suggests that “[p]rofessional journalists, by and large, seemed baffled early on by the edge-to-middle politics. . . . The top-down hierarchy of modern journalism probably played a role because editors probably couldn’t relate any better to the notion of a dispersed campaign than to the idea of readers directly assisting in the creation of journalism” (102). Independent blogs allowed a more open form of reporting to take place. In other words, the campaign climate was no longer being determined by a few people in journalism’s top spots. And, as Gillmor points out, “once the media grasped what was happening, the coverage emerged. Big Media, and the candidates, also started to realize that some of the best political journalism was coming from outside their ranks” (103).

Recently, I was interviewing a man who is a lobbyist for the University of Missouri System. I asked him what it was like to be in a position to advance the agenda for the university. While recognizing the tremendous amount of clout he carried, he said, “But not everyone can be the bus driver.” He was referring, of course, to the board of curators and the system president, who ultimately, and collectively, set his priorities as a lobbyist. The same could be said of journalists. They are in a position to set the agenda, but technology has allowed citizens to finally have a time in the driver’s seat. Gillmor suggests that “[w]hat the third-party sites such as independent blogs showed was the value of niche journalism in politics. The issues of our times are too complex, too nuanced, for the major media to cover properly, given the economic realities of modern corporate journalism” (103).

The hope, then, is that the more people taking turns at the driver’s seat, the better, more open, ethically upright journalism we be. And we journalists will emerge less scathed and, perhaps, more willing to take a back seat ride to citizens' engaging in democracy at its best.