Driven by technological change, journalism is being transformed in the ways that is used and produced. We are witnessing the emergence of a flurry of new tools and practices, leading to a redefinition of journalism in a digital age. While there is widespread fear and talk of crisis, we believe that current developments are paving the path towards better journalism and towards more independent journalist.
Rethinking Journalism in the Digital Age
In the new digital environment, there is more information than ever before. More new facts are being unearthed daily, more voices are being heard, more diverse perspectives on the same news stories are being presented, more stories are available, archived and searchable for longer periods of time, more men and women of power are being watched more closely and more people are engaged more actively with the changes in the world, by taking photos of key moments, by commenting on blogs or by sharing the stories that matter to them.
We believe that this dynamic landscape of witnessing, reporting, storytelling and sharing does not represent a crisis of journalism, but rather an explosion of it. In fact, journalism seems to be more alive than ever and going through a multiplication of forms and of content at amazing speed.
Journalism as a Public Good
The new digital landscape presents serious challenges to the old institutions of journalism, but the "crisis" in journalism seems to be mainly a crisis of the traditional business models of print and broadcast journalism. So, there is indeed a crisis of the media industry, but not necessarily a crisis of journalism.
We see journalism as a public good. It does not have profitability as a primary goal, but rather the production of reliable information and analysis that is needed in a democratic society.
New Journalists
We use a broad definition of journalism, which includes various new practices related to the production of meaningful information in the twenty-first century. In our view, journalism is not just the news (of the day or the week, of a city or even a country), but telling meaningful stories about what is new or is happening in the world, understanding it in context, explaining it to others and making it available so others can use it (keep it, share it, remix it and so forth) for their needs.
New opportunities for better journalism
For all those who want to experiment with new types of collaboration and technological tools, we have started to compile a field guide of best practices worldwide, keeping the key functions of journalism in mind. In the global network society, these key functions could be summarized as data collection, interpretation, storytelling and distribution, which are all subject to intense innovation and experimentation.
Networks
Every journalist becomes a node in a network. Networked journalism refers to a diffused capacity to record information, share it, and distribute it. In a world in which information and communication are organized around the Internet, the notion of the isolated journalist working alone is obsolete. Every journalist becomes a node in a network to collect, process, and distribute information. Journalistic practice now usually involves networks of various professionals and citizens collaborating, corroborating, correcting, and ultimately distilling the essence of the story.
Collective intelligence produces better journalism. Crowd sourcing extends beyond citizen journalism and covers a wide range of practices that make use of collective intelligence to gather and check information, tell stories, or make choices in news production. It includes user-generated content, which refers to photographs, video, textual comments, and other material provided by members of the public.
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Data
Big data reveal hidden patterns of the world. Colossal digital data sets are available as a source of news and analysis. Journalist can better navigate in the data with the help of programmers, designers, and hackers who are more skilled at uncovering and penetrating digital information. Faced with large data sets, journalists can add analysis, context, explanation, and storytelling.
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Visual
Visual storytelling is leading. Photos and video news are replacing text-based news as the main source of information for many people. Text, photos, video and audio sources are increasingly, integrated in various forms of interactive storytelling. Search engines based on visual matching are becoming more refined. Visual literacy is important for journalists and users. The full integration of television, internet and mobile phones is a fact of digital life. If there are no images, there is no news.
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Point of View
Journalism has a voice and a perspective. Multiple versions of the same story are a natural fact of digital life. Since most people are using multiple sources of news on multiple platforms, the presumed neutrality and objectivity of the journalist is difficult to maintain. For viewers and readers, it is easy to compare different stories online and spot the differences. Some journalists become trusted authors for their readers and followers. Some names become brands. Formats offering multiple points of view on the same topic are perceived as authentic and popular with audiences worldwide.
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Immersion
Experience the news by being inside the story. Innovation in 360-degree and 3D cameras is providing an increased sense of physical immersion and previously unavailable spatial points of view in visual storytelling. Immersive storytelling may also provide added engagement and the possibility of reflection through interaction and choices for the user, based on interactive models of game design. Immersive journalism emphasizes the first-person experience in a news story. It is a relatively new field, which incorporates news games, virtual reality technology and "world building".
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Robots
Robots will do more basic journalism. Increasingly, journalism will be produced by machines. Software robots of the crawlers type identify and retrieve press releases and news sources to package them, write articles and redistribute them to specific news outlets for information diffusion. Some business news organizations, such as Forbes, use these programs because the speed of information distribution is essential in globalized financial markets. There are also successful models for game coverage in sports. In these cases, the analytical component of journalism is still present in the design of programs of content analysis that form the basis for each type of software. Yet clearly, the more automated journalism develops in the phase of data collection and writing, the more journalists will have to specialize in interpretation, analysis, and storytelling.
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Publishing
New platforms and relationships emerge. Publishing of news and information is prone to intense experimentation globally. Digital tools and networks have dramatically diminished the technical costs of production and distribution of news. However, these innovations are not so easily integrated in the old news cycle While the traditional institutions of journalism are struggling to maintain a subscriber base, cut costs and reinvent themselves, many alternative models for the production and distribution of journalism pop up. Some of the new initiatives are mainly focused on pay walls and business models, while others relate to viewers, readers and users in entirely new ways. A monopoly on the production and distribution of information no longer exists.
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Specialize, Collaborate, or Perish!
Digital networks have transformed the newsroom. Working at Internet speed is changing the practice of professional journalists and puts tremendous pressure on journalim schools. Journalists in the digital age must be at the same time great multimedia storytellers, applied social scientists, and technologically savvy operators of expert data systems. Very few journalists will be able to reach this new level of sophistication in all of these fields. Therefore, they will have to specialize, in subject matter or in a phase of the journalism cycle, and collaborate. If not, they will lose the competition to the robots capable to perform routine data gathering and to the citizen journalists who constantly retrieve information in real life situations around them. The added value of professional journalists will be their analytical capacity and their ability to network.
The Future of Journalism is Yours
The multiple journalism of the digital age is not a threat to the independence and quality of professional journalism, but a liberation from strict corporate control. It is an opportunity for journalists to each excel in a unique way, and for society to benefit from an endless expansion of information and from a meaningful interpretation of this information in a world characterized by informed bewilderment. And as rich as the information availbable through the Internet is, much is not there, and first-hand reporting remains an essential part of good journalism. As a network we can optimize resources and generate synergy. New creativity will emerge from our sharing.