The method is the message
Thinking journalism as a discipline for the future - Media Ecology Newsletter #28
Newspapers and journalists have problems. But journalism is a discipline of the future.
I had the honor of presenting some ideas at a conference organized by the School of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University together with St Michael's College and the McLuhan Foundation. It was an experience that filled me with pride because of the quality of the people who were present. And even for the reception they gave to my proposals. At this link you can find a pdf with the notes I wrote to prepare the conference on my blog. A summary is published in this issue of the Media Ecology newsletter.
Newspaper publishers have their own problems, big ones. And consequently, the journalists who work for those publishers have problems. The spaces for traditional business models have shrunk radically in the digital environment. Trust in newspapers has halved over the past 50 years in the United States, according to Gallup. But for Edelman, this is a phenomenon that affects dozens of large countries around the world. Meanwhile, people who don't want to know about access to news have increased to 38 percent, according to the Reuters Institute.
Newspapers and journalists as they were traditionally organized have been interpreted over the past twenty or thirty years in a frame that placed them in a kind of fatal decline.
Journalism, however, is a concept of the future. And it should be kept in mind that newspapers and journalists, in the world of digital media, are not the only ones involved in journalism.
What is journalism? There are many definitions. Some very good ones. "The first draft of history." Beautiful. "The literature of civic life." For Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, "The purpose of journalism is to tell the truth so that people can have the information they need to be sovereign." All very nice. But in a context in which trust needs to be rebuilt, we need to think about valuing some foundational characters that can be of value to society. And rather than looking at the hoped-for outcome of journalism, perhaps it is worth looking at the preconditions that can foster that outcome.
In this sense, journalism is best defined by its method. It is not a question of who does it or why it is done, but how it is done.
Journalism is a research discipline that is about knowing how things are reliably and accurately. Journalism is its method. The method is its message. And this method is a kind of craft version of the scientific method. It is a way of doing information "done right." News done well is geared to serve the audience not the sources, it is documented, it is reported accurately, aware of the laws, in a manner commensurate with its importance.
Journalism has evolved over time, it is being cultivated in a media ecosystem in which information is produced and communicated in the most diverse ways by the most diverse people and institutions. But it is clear that these can either make information carelessly about quality or follow canons that come from the discipline of journalism.
Journalism is essential to counter fake news and biased controversies conducted within narratives that lack factual foundation. Journalism is essential for finding common ground on which then people and organizations can discuss what decisions to make.
Can any of this be thought to be outdated? On the contrary. It is increasingly necessary. In an age in which people can inform themselves about their health conditions and what treatment to take, a form of journalism is essential to enable them to distinguish between manipulative news and news that can truly be good for their health. The same can be said of news that is used to make investment decisions. Or to choose their children's education. Or even to have opinions about the future and much more. Beyond the political debate, which often remains the main topic of discussion about how people are informed, the quality of all daily life depends on the quality of information people can find.
In this sense, it can be said that not only journalists do journalism and not all journalists do journalism. Journalism is a much larger cultural space than what is now about newspapers and journalists. It is a space in which there are all citizens who contribute information done well through the channels that they have available to them, and it is a space in which all citizens who recognize the value of information done well are willing to support those who do it, full-time or not.
Journalism, then, is a discipline that needs to be valued as part of a strategy to build a sustainable media ecology. This is not the only aspect of this strategy. All the rules that lead platforms to take responsibility are part of it. It includes all the activities of cultural institutions, educational institutions, and companies that contribute to the sustainability of the media system also through the sharing of information done well. Oriented toward the common good of knowledge.
Journalism is a cultural space in which innovation has a direction. It is not enough for an idea to be new for it to be innovative. Nor is it enough for it to work and be adopted. It needs to serve the sustainability of the media ecology.
Other documents quoted at the conference
ProPublica (2023): Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire
CNN (2016): Gingrich, Camerota debate crime stats
OpenAI (2023): GPT-4
Please take a look at Reimagine Europa. A Media Ecology Research Network is being build in Bruxelles and it grows every day. I will be informing on that more in the next issues. Reimagine Europa.
Podcasts in Italian, by me
L’altra metà del verso. Rai Radio 3
Media Ecology. Intesa Sanpaolo on air
Eppur s’innova. Luiss University Press
Ecology of screens
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