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An Introduction:
Do We Trust Our Audiences?

Cole Campbell, Dean, Reynolds School of Journalism,
University of Nevada, Reno

I don’t know how many of you saw the piece by Jack Shafer on Slate that he posted at the end of the week on Friday. He basically said: “I’m beginning to doubt the trust and credibility of the mainstream reader.” It’s a fun piece to read, and I think he puts a finger on something, perhaps inadvertently, we ought to be thinking about today, and that is our ambiguous relationship to the people we serve. We don’t know whether to blame them, serve them, ignore them, or how we ought to be treating the people who populate the communities we serve. We don’t know whether to think of them as clients, as customers, or as citizens in the narrowly defined Black’s Law /AP stylebook version or in the more expansive version. . . I think that’s the probably the central question that underlies what we’ll be talking about: who these people are, what do we think about them, what room are we going to make for them in our work lives, are we going to treat them as our peers, as our superiors, or as our inferiors. I think, thematically, we’ll be exploring many dimensions of that.

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