Future citizenship journalism

Frankly speaking, as I am reading the Bennett’s essay, I suddenly realize that what he says is really happening around me, wherever I am. How slow I am to find out now that with the emergence and boom of new media, internet, for example, people are concerning more and more about the society we live in, and are becoming excellent citizens. Especially the young generations, which are the main points of Bennett’s statements.

My younger brother, for instance, when I was the same age as his, as a teenager, I was more interested into pop stars, interesting movies and so on. But, my brother, almost every day after classes, he surfs the internet as soon as possible, no longer just about pop stars, movies, games etc., instead he often goes to different kinds of news websites, and so do my lots of friends. Therefore, new media has made us become a better citizen.

Besides, in my opinion, the main idea that Lewis and Hermes want us, particularly journalists, to know is that in order to help gradually build peoples’ senses of good citizenship, it is very important and necessary for journalists to build good citizenship between the lines in their reports first. Just like Lewis says: “But news, more than other cultural form, carries the burden of defining the world in which citizens operate.”

However, it is not to say that in today’s news citizens are excluded, according to the essays, in one form or another, the news makes frequent reference to citizens or publics. But, because they do not propose, initiate, debate ore engage, they are like ‘extras’ in the news. Consequently, what we should do now is to provide citizens with more enticing and engaging news about their living cities, to put more city-concerned news on center stages. And this is the exact image they want future media to build.

Finally, using a sentence in Hermes’ articles where the essence exists to conclude, these are all about “Questions of what we expect from the news as a citizenship medium, and questions of how citizenship is nurtured and bolstered more generally are of evident importance now that new technologies are taken up and are changing the media landscape.”