The End of an Era or The Start of a New One?
By Nayelis Vargas
My favorite part of journalism has always been to read about the news through different lens thanks to the hundreds of news outlets and platforms provided in today’s day and age.
News for us evolved from coming via word of mouth, to being written and so forth. But that’s the thing. Journalists probably wouldn’t have succeeded as much without one main & highly significant event.
Evolution
That word alone is enough to explain the ongoing development with journalism and the news.
We cannot thrive without changes and without allowing ourselves as journalists to listen to our audiences in order to better connect and relate more towards what they are looking for when they read our pieces.
It means speaking through different voices and through different ideas. To simplify, it also means being open to change, and making our newsrooms more diverse and open to people of different walks of life.
And in order to survive in a business that is in jeopardy this is what we need.
To survive and rise up against this war that’s been plaguing us journalists throughout the past few years we need to make changes. Some of those changes need to start from within our own news organizations starting from our leaders and extending to the very bottom of our offices. Because our values and our words are a reflection to society of what we stand for. And those things have the power to break us apart.
During the International Journalism Festival, a panel discussion where a group of experienced journalists sat down and discussed today’s modern day and age journalism, as well as other matters such as today’s gatekeepers and mistakes news outlets allowed to be made, one speaker caught my attention. And her name was Janine Gibson, assistant editor and editor special project at the Financial Times.
Gibson made a reference to gate-keeping via the start of social media platforms, and of how because we have allowed for these platforms to take over and filter what we’ve had to say, that has played a role in what our readers interpret from us.
While that isn’t the bulk summary of where our issues between us delivering “fake news” and society’s mistrust of us, it is one of the main problems reflected into our news publications and if we made changes internally & took a stand then just maybe we’d take back from those gate keeping platforms.
Do we as journalists have a future still? The answer is most definitely. This new millennium of journalists understand the power of their words and the power of making a difference in the masses. But we can’t do it without the help of our more experienced peers and leaders. And we really just CANNOT do it without making changes.
