What’s Journalism In the Next Decade looking like?
By Nayelis Vargas
Journalism will always be around. Why? Because at the end of it all, journalists are contributors to society who not only do the research, but tell the people of their findings. And while there is that stigma that because we carry the title of journalists, and because there have been unfortunate cases of journalists who HAVE abused of their power, there’s this idea that we all tell “false news,” which of course is a lie on its own. Our only real flaw is that we just want to tell our audiences the unadulterated truth. And sometimes we get lost along the way.
Now how do we get lost? The problem, in this case, today is not the writing itself. But the problem is WHO is writing the stories that several of us read when we scroll through our news apps. I know that often when the average person reads, they don’t think about who the writer is, or even what their goal for writing the story was. But for those of us involved in the process in creating these stories, we often think about and keep an eye out for these things. And in all honesty these are some of the things I think about, that leads me to believe that journalism will always be in flux.
I say in flux because journalism is always ever changing, especially in situations when the question of who exactly are the people in our newsrooms is brought up.
If you look at the statistics that are. nationally recorded from different newsrooms in regards to their diversity, you note that a major percentage of those charts are white or male. Those factors matter to our audiences because now a deeper look at these publications need to be made. Can they relate to their audiences and how can what they write about affect readers? In order to answer that and to help our writers be more relatable to our readers diversity is necessary and over the years these same charts have shown these changes.
Take a look at Vox, when you go on their website and look at the diversity in their newsroom, you can observe the changes in the statistics. Look at how in the span of five years they went from having more than half of its staff as men, to 47% of them being women.
Or of how they have increased in their Black or Asian staff members. It shows they care about their audiences and acknowledge that part of their jobs is to help readers feel understood. Not only that but to further help their jobs as journalists and give back to their communities.
Now as for what will contribute to the fall of news, if ever? It’s the lack of change. Some publications need to understand that without an audience you have nothing.
This country is built around different shades and communities and what good is it if a connection with those communities are nonexistent? Word of advice, try to recruit writers who don’t all look or sound the same.
