Andrew Gruen (J07, WCAS07)
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Alumnus Andrew Gruen (J07, WCAS07) has been steadily working and traveling the globe trying to put his finger on the pulse of new journalism. So far, he’s been to Chicago, San Francisco, Orlando, London, Cambridge, parts of Europe, and now, South Korea.
“While abroad this past year, I’ve been peering back at the U.S. and the world of journalism I left,” begins Gruen. “We’ve collectively thought about journalism in one way in the past century: everything is pretty much paid for by advertising and we’ve been very comfortable with that situation. In the meantime, many papers are going strictly online or shutting down.”
Gruen, who received his bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science from Northwestern in 2007, is the recipient of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and is one of 18 students to become a Luce Scholar in 2009. In this prestigious role, he is in South Korea for 11 months to work at the Korean news organization, OhmyNews.com, an online journal dedicated to the phenomena of “citizen journalism.”
“Citizen journalism is a new way of reporting the news,” explains Gruen. “The public plays an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information, and with new technology and applications, it is spreading rapidly.”
With his background in new media and technology, Gruen is taking his experiences with the BBC as a technology reporter, and as a digital executive producer for Orlando-based Hearst-Argyle Television’s WESH.com, to his new position at OhmyNews.com so that he may continue understanding how a citizen journalist publication works.
“One thing I have already seen in my studies and experiences in journalism is that we are going from this monoculture into a polyculture: There is the public radio model, the ProPublica model (an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest), the free dailies offered on mass transit, aggregators like Yahoo! and Google, and then there is this Twitter phenomenon, which lends its immediacy to citizen journalism. So, we have all these new mediums that are cropping up.”
In order to marry the ideas of this type of new journalism and further investigate ways it has and will influence society, Gruen completed his MPhil in Modern Societies and Global Transformations at Cambridge, and will be going for a doctorate in Sociology when he returns from Korea.
“It’s now a question of how we use and treat these various news outlets and what society does with them” he says. “Good reporting still stands, we all just need to appreciate what these new venues are while still simultaneously accessing traditional mediums as well.”
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Posted August 31, 2009.
