Patrick Walters is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. His research interests include journalistic boundaries, media gatekeeping, media history, solutions journalism, and journalistic collaborations. His work has been published in Journalism, Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice, American Journalism, and other publications. A former reporter for the Associated Press, Walters’s journalistic work has appeared in USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and other publications. He holds a Ph.D. in Media & Communication from Temple University, an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Goucher College, and a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia.
Q: How did you become introduced to the #HandsUpDontShoot/Michael Brown case, and why did you want to study it?
Walters: I first started wanting to study it in 2014 right as it was happening. I had left the Associated Press where I had been a reporter and editor for about twelve years, and I was entering a year of teaching. I was watching, and as it was unfolding, I became fascinated in how it showed journalistic dynamics sort of changing. Having covered, unfortunately, a lot of shootings and crime at the AP in Philly, I had sort of watched and observed and experienced the ways that people reacted to that coverage in different ways, starting in probably ‘05 with sort of very early Myspace-ish and Facebook type stuff.
But when I saw the Michael Brown shooting and that tragedy, I sensed that something was happening a little bit differently with that. So, I would say right as it was happening, I started trying to do a project on it right afterwards. But I realized I didn’t know what I was trying to say, and by the time I fiddled with it a second time, I was in graduate school for my PhD, and that was around 2019, so it was about five years later. I kind of put it down and didn’t really know what to do with it. When I first started doing it, it kind of just felt like I was detailing the history of breaking news. At the time, I had been putting together a class on covering breaking news, but it felt like I was just sort of writing a history. But then in 2019, I sort of decided to pick it up again when I was going back to graduate school, and that was really when I started. That’s when this project began in earnest, I would say.
Q: Can you talk about why “recent past” research in journalism is important and why you’re interested in it?
Walters: Yeah, that was one of my big challenges with this. I felt like I was looking at something, and I was trying to figure out what it was, what I was seeing. When I was working on this at Temple University during my Ph.D., my professor at the time, Devon Powers, who is now at the University of Michigan, she sort of said, ‘It almost feels like you’re trying to write a history piece.’ And I don’t do a ton of historical research, and so I had to sort of piece that together, that that’s what I was looking at. I was trying to figure out, “How do I take this moment that seems like it’s evolving constantly, and examine what, if anything, it’s saying about the state of journalism?” So, it was as I really started working on it the second time, which was about four years later, that I saw the most helpful way to look at it was to take a big step back and look at this in the framework of history.
Of course, the problem, in terms of recent past, is that it wasn’t that long ago. I think it’s important that we try to put work, even things within the relatively recent past, to put them in a historical perspective, to sort of look at the ways that they function in the broader context. So, I think that is what I was trying to do here. I was trying to see what it looked like in the grand scheme of things, which is what made me want to take a sort of recent past approach.
Q: How do “recent past” historians use the past to examine the bigger picture or think about how to proceed in the future?
Walters: I think that’s a great question to ask. We all know journalism has been changing so quickly, particularly starting in the early ‘90s, and then moving up in terms of technological advances. And so, one of the things I try to address in the paper is the concerns about presentism, where one idea of it is when people say, “If we just treat every moment as a critical moment or as a key moment…” and we can’t do that. But here, I sort of felt like situating it in that way, in this particular moment, and trying to look at like, “What were the broad tensions that were at play here in this moment, and how do they compare, in some ways, to those sort of tensions in previous moments throughout history, so as not to just look at it like it’s a completely unique situation?” It is a unique situation, but it is related to some of these other things that have happened throughout the past hundred years.
Q: What do you think is the most important journalistic “critical incident” of the 21st century so far?
Walters: In the 21st century, broadly speaking, I still think that the onset of the internet, overall, is the context in which everything we talk about is in that framework. My students of course chuckle when I say, “you know, it feels like the internet has been around forever,” and if somebody is a digital native, it has been around forever. But I do think about how I graduated college in 1999, so I’m thinking, at that time, everybody said, “Nobody knows how newspapers are gonna handle the internet,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but we’ve been handling it for the last five years in my college newspaper!” But I think pretty much every single thing that we have seen in terms of how news is produced in the 21st century goes back to this continued struggle to figure out how to handle an online world. And at this point, it almost feels archaic to say that, but I think it’s true now that everything is social media. It’s in some ways a different utilization of the internet. That’s really what it is. I think I talk about it in the paper, in ‘05 is when the “blogosphere” was the new thing, just another use of the internet and something that was essentially usurped by the evolution of social media. So, I think that the overarching, fundamental critical incident of the 21st century is the advent and development of the internet. Which, of course, the internet traces back to the 1960s, but not until the early-to-mid-‘90s was it available to regular people. So, I would say the 21st century to me, that is still the ultimate and the dominant critical incident that we’re seeing play out.
Q: What are the benefits of this restructuring of gatekeeping in journalism as well as the emergence of ‘citizen advocacy’ talked about in your paper?
Walters: It was the gatekeeping framework that sort of helped me to figure out, as a graduate student, what I was trying to say in this paper, because I think, like you’re supposed to be when you get into graduate school, questioning all these assumptions. And having worked in journalism for fifteen years, people were always saying to me, “We’ve gotta get you to unlearn everything that you’ve learned!” And I agreed and pushed back enough to say, “How about contextualize everything I’ve learned?” And that’s part of it, but with gatekeeping, I certainly came into this thinking, “Yeah, the internet is making the world so that everybody can send and submit information!” And I think in grad school, as I started to sort of question this and learn a little more about gatekeeping, I realized, “Wow, that is an incredibly oversimplified version of the world there, Patrick.” And so, when you think about gatekeeping and the idea of who controls the voices that are allowed to dominate or allowed to at least speak loudly, that’s what this story really spoke to. This idea of what forces impact which bits of information are selected for us or put in front of our faces.
I think there’s a lot of different ways people have described this, but it’s like, you can throw information out into the void, and anybody can do that now, but with gatekeeping, there still is an element of “Who are the entities that are putting information in front of a lot of eyeballs, in front of a lot of people so that they don’t have to go digging for it?” And I think that was part of what we saw play out in Ferguson. Some of these citizen voices that made themselves the dominant part of the conversation sort of flipped it a little bit so that journalists had to respond to them. That classic model of covering a shooting, you know, you cover a shooting as a journalist, and then you’d interview neighbors, then they’d talk to you, and then you’d put that in your story. That’s kind of that classic late twentieth-early twenty-first century model, and here, I think you see that gatekeeping model flipping, to some extent, because you’re seeing the people on the ground who were then having a greater—or at least for a moment—a greater impact on that initial narrative. That is where they had, for that moment, more gatekeeping power, because people were then responding to their narrative as opposed to the citizens responding to the narrative of the mainstream journalists.
Q: What can citizen journalists provide that traditional journalists cannot?
Walters: One of the things I get into in the paper is this idea of network gatekeeping. So ultimately, when an ecosystem is thriving, you’ve got journalists who are putting information out there, you’ve got citizens who are putting information out there, and optimally, all of that is fusing together into an informative quilt of information. But in terms of citizens, for a long time, information in journalism has been controlled by white men in newsrooms, right? Yes, I am a white man, I have spent a ton of time in the newsroom, but I am also thinking, there’re a lot of factors that determine who these people are ending up in newsrooms and controlling this agenda. Journalism has worked in fits and starts to try and make itself diverse, and again, the irony of me saying that is not lost. I’m saying, I think that a better journalism is one that has more voices included in it, not all of whom are going to agree with each other. When you think about it that way, that’s where these citizen voices that are living in these communities, that are not one degree or two degrees removed, those are voices we have to hear.
Whether you’re covering crime in Philadelphia, whether you’re covering a protest in New York, whether you’re covering a natural disaster in California, we have to have those voices that are unadulterated and there on the ground. They are playing a key role in the story. That is a very important thing when we say citizen journalists. It’s going to be a forever debate, “What’s the difference between a citizen journalist and a journalist?” If you are conveying true information about the world around you to a community, that’s an act of journalism. And if an effort has been made to verify and try to curate it in a sort of complete and telling manner, that’s an act of journalism. In many ways, I think we should be more concerned about who is performing acts of journalism that help advance acts of public knowledge and public understanding rather than who they are. I think that in Ferguson, we sort of saw some of that where it was less about who was a journalist, but who was performing that act of journalism.
Q: Do you think that with the rise of citizen journalism there is a possibility of an increased spread of misinformation?
Walters: No question about it. I think that if I go back to myself last working in a newsroom in 2014 and today, and I think in some senses, I’m trying to look at things from a bigger picture here. But I think, sure, when you have more people sending out information, there’s going to be more information that may have mistakes, or there’s going to be more information that might not be 100 percent accurate. However, one of the fundamental principles of journalism that is most consistent, as I would define journalism, is verification. Some attempt to verify that something is accurate and true with the understanding that that could be through any number of lenses. But verification is important. So, to the extent that a citizen journalist is making an attempt to verify information, that’s adding substantially to our news ecosystem.
Now, the First Amendment’s on my wall over there, there’s no law that says you have to verify something before sharing a piece of information. And so, yeah, when you open the gates wider, there’s a potential that there’s going to be more erroneous information out there. But at the same time, I don’t think that we can be so paternalistic to be like, “But if we only had journalists doing it, we wouldn’t make many mistakes.” I’ve worked in journalism for fifteen years, I’ve made a few mistakes, not a ton, but a few. I think that’s something we have to keep in mind. Yes, a huge role of a journalist as a gatekeeper now is helping the audiences to make sense of everything that is out there, not just the journalists’ work. So, the answer to the question of course is, “Does opening up the gates make more possibilities for more mistakes and misinformation?” Yeah, it does. Is that cost worth the benefit of having the potential of more voices to be able to give credible information? I’m inclined to say yes. At the same time, both the benefit and the concern are true.
Q: Any last thoughts or comments?
Walters: I think the big thing is just sort of thinking through, in a case like this, what kinds of questions does it make us ask moving forward? In the piece, it makes the case, a critical incident is a challenge presented by something that often uses a new technology and somebody who’s essentially testing out and using that new technology in a different way. So, I think this was that those pressures created a moment that I think should have us asking questions about whether the way things played out is for the better or needs to be improved upon.