Join Senior Lecturer Bob Calo in a conversation about the demographic, cultural and political roots of audience disengagement. He’ll be talking about his recent article as a Shorenstein Center Goldsmith Fellow, at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in the Spring 2011: “Disengaged: Elite Media in a Vernacular Nation“.

Journalists tend to regard the “crisis in journalism” as something that happened to them, and not anything they did. It was the Internet that jumbled the informational sensitivities of their readers, corporate ownership that raised suspicions about our editorial motives, the audience itself that lacked the education or perspective to appreciate the work. Yet, 40 years of polling is clear about one thing: The decline in trust and the uneasiness of the audience with the profession and its product started well before technology began to shred the conventions of the media. If we fail to examine our part in the collapse of trust, no amount of digital re-imagining or niche marketing is going to restore our desired place in the public conversation.