Journalism always has a future
Last year, I attended Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at the Ohio State University learning and honing my digital journalism skills. Not only the course, the program was fantastic as I got to know a few brilliant people there. One of them is Manuel Moreno, from Spain. We became more brothers than friends and spend a brilliant week together. I feel privileged to know him as he has a devoted himself in technology and runs Trecebits — a popular portal and is expecting publication of his first book in 2014.
After we both returned to our homes, he wanted to publish an interview at Trecebits. I couldn’t speak Spanish so he took all the pain to send me English questions, translate my answers and publish it in the popular website. Since it’s in Spanish, I thought I would keep the English version in my blog. Here it is:
How do you think journalism has changed since Internet and social networks became popular on the newsrooms?
When I first joined in as an intern reporter in one of the daily newspapers in Nepal some 14 years ago, there were no computers at newsroom. There were Macintosh computers to design pages in designing section. Since then a lot have been changed. Now newsroom in Nepal can not be imagined without computers and media are slowly getting hooked with social networks.
At a few newsroom, social networks are still blocked at peak work hour but they are slowly getting popular as source of information.
The change that social networks have brought include sourcing information and promotion of the news items. Journalists in Nepal mostly use social network to get tips for news stories and share a lot of things they write.
It’s a great source of information and opinions on those information. That way, it also becomes a source of information — and at many times I have used the social media postings to tip the journalists for next stories.
The other professional use of the Internet and social media is verification and crowd sourced verification. Internet is a great tool to verify information, to dig deeper on people and events, and to find out background information. The social media is great for asking people to verify things and pull out contents.
Digital or print… do we really have to choose?
Not really. They both are complimentary to each other. But I also feel that this is not a question that should matter to journalism or journalists. Because they are just platform to present the news. The better, easier and cheaper platform will dominate how the news is presented.
For us as journalists, we should focus on the future of journalism, not indulge in the question about existence of platforms.
Journalism always has a future. The emergence of the Internet is complimentary to the profession and it’s not alternative. Journalism emerged out of people’s need to understand and keep up with important information happening within a society, and it will remain to be such.
People will always look for information, difference perspectives and opinions of others. It’s just human nature and that Internet or even “citizen journalism” can’t completely fulfil.
Overall, I feel like the basic contents should remain free on the Internet. Only exclusive content should be charged. By exclusive, I mean the content that are not available other place.
You live in a country where the main challenge is that the population have a real access to Internet, but what other challenges do you face at your job as a journalist?
Access to Internet is limited in Nepal. Only around 12 percent have the access on computer or related devices (excluding mobiles) and that too is limited in urban areas. This is the big challenge as digital journalist. Overall challenges for journalism in Nepal is lack of professionalism due to lack of trainings and skill development opportunities, lack of revenue thus very low wage for journalists (minimum wage fixed is around USD 110 a month which many of the journalists do not get), aggression on media (there are incidents of beating and threatening journalists almost every day) and impunity.
In 2005, blogs were the only source of uncensored information in Nepal when the then King Gyanendra imposed military censorship in all newsroom after cutting Internet and telephones off for a week. Blogs led the fightback for democracy.
Even last week, there are an inhuman incident happening in eastern part of Nepal. Mainstream media somehow chose to ignore the incident completely, but a blog raised it to an extend that it got national attention. Mainstream media were forced to cover the event after a couple of days, and in a way help the victim to get justice.
Mainstream media are not enough always and at that time, blogs play crucial role in complimenting the journalism.
Originally published at http://www.nepalivoices.com on December 30, 2013.
