That’s Dan Gillmor’s goal in a new book, Mediactive. Gillmor, a professor at the Cronkite School, has posted the first chapter online.

It seems as if it will be a survey of the changes in media we’re seeing (most notably the implosion of print media’s business model) and his vision of how journalists—and, importantly, consumers of their work—might see their way through.

I get a sharp pain behind my eyes when I read a lot of the idealistic prescriptions for American journalism. There’s a lot of “coulds.” People could participate in journalism a lot more than they do.

But let’s face it, most won’t—because they don’t care, because they don’t have the skills, or, in most cases, simply because they have a life and have better things to do.

In that context, this graf is refreshing:

Don’t get the idea that this is some kind of stern lecture about how you must do this or that or else you’re a bad person. Nor is this an “eat your (insert vegetable you loathe) because it’s good for you” exercise. We’re talking about doing something that’s often fun, if you have the slightest curiosity about the world, and downright useful the rest of the time.

I’m interested in the whole book. As he posts chapters, if I have something to say I’ll discuss it here.

A few thoughts on the first part of the first chapter—not to criticize but rather, as he asks, to provide feedback for iterations of the book as it’s being written. Gillmor writes:

Yet to assure a continued supply of quality information, we have to address the other side of a classic economic and social equation: demand. And to put it mildly, our demand today isn’t so great. In fact, it’s downright crappy.

Unless we all demand something better than we’ve been getting, we will get more of the same sludge that now dominates the world of news. I have nothing against entertainment. But information that doesn’t help us make better decisions about our families and our communities leaves us short-changed.

Two comments. One, I’m not sure it’s productive, in this particular discussion, to apply value judgments like “crappy” to demand. Believe me, I find the taste of the average American consumer positively horrific. And it’s fun to ridicule it.

But the future of journalism demands a tough engagement with… well, reality. And reality is what is going to dictate the success of media in the future. So let’s remember that people never really bought news. (Gillmor makes this point, one of my pet contentions on the issue, early in the chapter.) A lot of them were buying advertising, and in the end, what people paid made up only a small fraction of the average newspaper’s budget.

So there’s never really been a mass demand for news where it counts, which is the pocketbook. My point is just that, in this context, demand isn’t crappy. It is what it is—and those who hope to create the news of the future need to figure out what people want.

That said, there’s a big upside to this: People actually didn’t want a lot of what they were getting, because it was being provided by monopolies that were mostly serving their (that is, the monopolies’) advertisers. That’s why, to note just one obvious example, papers still have travel sections. The advertising department demands it.

So the good news is that a lot of the resources newspapers did have were wasted, journalistically. Only a small part of the average newspaper’s editorial budget went to actual news. In this context, the upside is that the new creators of content are free from a lot of the crap—here the word is appropriate—newspapers used to foist on us.

I’m sure Gillmor will get to those points as he goes on. I’m enjoying it thus far.