sábado, 16 de diciembre de 2017

In Search of a News Strainer Reporter

Journalism Is Going Into the “Re-Information” Age

Enrique Castejón-Lara


Abstract

The explosive emission of information through the social media has generated an extreme confusion in society. People need help to understand what is really happening in their countries and the world, and also to evade fake news. So, contemporary journalism has to provide a new type of reporter capable to analyze that information mess and provide trusty versions of what social media reflect.


The overwhelming stream of information generated by the increasing users of blogs, Web sites, and social media has been producing in the last decade a terrible communicational concern on people. Present-day society is immersed in a torrent of uncontrolled data that, usually, include fake news and unconfirmed facts. That means that journalism is going, formally, into the “re-information” era. Every day, reporters have to search intensively among an enormous quantity of messages to try unveiling truth.

In this new mass communication scenario, the traditional press reporter feels lost, confuse, and unfit. In fact, some technology fanatics have predicated the end of newsmen, and journalism itself.

Question is, who is nowadays prepared to clean up that huge information mess? Nobody, I am sure, expected this massive and uncontrolled data flow that is generated by billions of people worldwide. On the contrary, some media and news agencies are right now appealing to “robotic” software to minimize the effect of data saturation and fake information. That is the case of Reuters, which is using its “News Tracer[1]” system to identify last minute affairs on Twitter and other social media reducing research time and inaccuracies.

However, the accelerated information environment change will require a new kind of professional that can classify, organize, and interpret all data that come from anywhere, including from the “intelligent robots.” That job cannot be assumed by the “spontaneous news men,” usually called “citizen reporters,” that continuously transmit information through social media.

Nowadays, most Mass Communication Schools around the world are making changes in their curricula to adjust key journalism courses to the new reality, but they mainly are doing that to give to their students the necessary skills and tools to use social media. Nevertheless, it is necessary that academic institutions take a historical step forward, and begin the training of a new generation of reporters capable to become, in this crushing torrent of data that has been generated by the cyberspace, a sort of guards that protect a stunned society from confusing reports and fake news diffusion. They should be smart enough to take the information from the social media data storm and process it to give to the audiences confirmed and trusted stories. That means, journalism is right now at the beginning of a “re-information” age.


[1] http://www.media-tics.com/noticia/7830/Medios-de-Comunicaci%C3%B3n/reuters-automatiza-identificaci%C3%B3n-noticias-twitter.html

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