Journalism surviving

People Keep Needing Its Help

Printed Media Vanish, Journalism Survives

Enrique Castejón-Lara

Abstract

This article complements the ideas expressed by the author on his prior one, entitle “Journalism is going into the re-information age.”  This paper refers to the increasing closing of printed media that has make some communication experts expose their concerns about journalism’s future. It, indeed, is confronting serious difficulties to survive in the information paperless age. However, it has a very extend know-how that offers the key to understand the fast and complex changes of the contemporary world.

Digital revolution has been ruthless with printed media. One behind other is going out of printing shop because of increasing lack of audiences. Last month, on December —a traditional happy holyday season—, one of the most important Spanish daily, El Pais, gave the first step to go out of printed version. It announced that stopped down its own printing shop to print its paper edition, with a very lower circulation, in a different press rotary shared by several printed media.

No doubt, digital and social media have an increasing influence in nowadays audiences. People, according to recent years’ experience, prefer the fastest and dynamic emission of messages on line than the 24-hour and other static printed news issues. However, journalism has a historic know-how to interpret news meaning that they cannot throw away.

The news environment, anywhere in the world, is rapidly becoming more and more complex, and very hard to understand because of the intense flow of odd messages. Journalism has methods (Meyer, 2002; Castejon, 2015) that permit chose and evaluate the most relevant issues from all news sources. So that, it has the right techniques to verify them before writing solid-reliable news stories.

In a society that, with the pass of time, is more and more immersed in an almost incomprehensible storm of messages, people will need those clarifying abilities of journalism. So, the new circumstances generated by the digital revolution make us think that, indeed, media printed on paper could be definitely vanishing. Nevertheless, journalism, once again in history, will demonstrate that it has the resources to survive in that paperless news diffusion age.

References

Castejon-Lara, Enrique. Interpretative reporting. CreateSpace Independent Publishing (Amazon), 2015.

Meyer, Philip. Precision Journalism. Rowan & Littlefield publishers, 2002.

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