Many thanks to Samara volunteer Alex Derry, who reported from the recent Samara/Massey seminar. His first post on the event is available here.
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Earlier this month, Kathy English posed three key questions about the future of journalism, in light of Pew’s 2010 State of the News Media report:
1. What ethical values about journalism will guide new media?
2. Will legacy media cooperate more?
3. If so, how can one operation vouch for fairness and accuracy of something they did not produce?
While in Toronto, Tom Rosenstiel, the report’s author, attempted to provoke discussion on these riddles by outlining eight potential roles for journalism to play as it considers its evolution and survival. With the death of the "journalism as gatekeeper" metaphor, what might emerge as its replacement? What core services must journalism provide?
Rosenstiel hypotheses that there could be at least eight:
1) Authenticators: Media outlets that act as a content referee on multiple sources or opinions, validating the facts and moderating the debate, so that they can positively answer the reader's question “what can I believe”?
2) Watchdogs: The classic role played by the investigative reporter, ensuring democratic transparency and political accountability.
3) Witnesses: The important and too-often thankless work of covering civic news, including municipal council meetings. It’s often time-consuming and costly, but is crucial, Rosenstiel believes, for effective local democracy.
4) Forum Leaders: Moderated platform for informed public debate, where people can engage other readers in discussion and expand upon the sources and content of the story itself.
5) Sense-makers: Media outlets that both aggregate stories from multiple sources and synthesize them, serving readers who are unfamiliar with the issue or don't have the time to sift through various points of entry. While information is easy to disseminate, knowledge is harder to create.
6) Empowering: Providing citizens with the interactive tools that give them the power to report and promote their side of the story. In other words, enabling improved and more accessible citizen journalism.
7) Smart Aggregators: Services that don’t simply throw together stories from all over the web into one pot but instead curate them into related topics that are frequently updated and that enabling citizens to stay on top of their newsfeeds.
8) Role Models: Of universal importance is that journalists must be trusted, and seen as role models. People like reading stories by people they know, respect and trust.
If we return to English's three questions with these roles in mind, it's apparent that the same ethical values that motivated old journalism (e.g., transparency, accuracy, immediacy, public debate, democratic accountability) are not that different from the ones that guide new media. Does legacy news media uphold those values all the time? No. And does new media? No. But their underlying motivations are likely more similar than they are different.
In fact, as Rosensteil pointed out, the “fortunes of new and old are more tied together than many think.”
Journalism is no longer a final product, but a fluid service - something those working online know very well. According to the PEJ, 34% of Americans “like coming across news,” while 28% “only follow specific topics.” The challenge facing legacy media is not lack of audience, but difficulties in changing well-established ways of doing business in light of technological changes.
Partnerships between new and old, such as the one struck up between ProPublica and the New York Times, which yesterday resulted in a Pulitzer Prize, demonstrate ways that fairness and accuracy of reporting can be maintained. While only a small example (and you can hear the CEO of ProPublica talk about the challenges in starting up this new model, the ways its advancing its new media functions, and the path ahead here), there’s much to be learned from it.
Probably the largest issue that links old media and new, however, is figuring out the business model, and in particular, how news organizations can find more revenue online.
For some of Rosenstiel’s ideas on this, stayed tuned for part 3 and the edited videos of his talk, coming soon!