A Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University in Wales last week heard from several scholars about the importance of connecting with industry practitioners – a subject that’s been rather controversial over the years as journalists, pressed by time and lack of money, have found it hard to come up with solutions to the challenges posed by digital transformation. Not that journalists always listen to scholars. Indeed, many journalists bemoan the irrelevance of academic research to their everyday work experiences – even if many journalism scholars are ex-journalists.
Among the challenges discussed at Cardiff was information disorder. While a critical part of the journalistic process is fact checking and verification, the information ecosystem is so polluted with poor information that it’s often hard for journalists to know what's true and to find trustworthy sources of information. Thus, the rise of third-party fact checkers. But, as Dr Valerie Belair-Gagnon of the University of Minnesota noted, the move to external fact-checking programs, often funded by the digital platforms, raises further questions around neutrality. In Australia at least, news media organisations look to these external organisations to perform perhaps the most critical part of the journalism process. Generally, fact-checking organisations choose which stories to check, passing them on to the news organisation, and much of the result depends on the variable skill and disposition of the fact checker.
Another challenge is the rise of alternative media and the decreasing trust in legacy media. None of this is made any easier by the way legacy media editors view these 'interlopers'. Researchers from Roskilde University in Denmark have been surveying legacy news editors in Scandinavia. The attitudes they encountered ranged from total lack of acceptance to mild tolerance. Editors told the researchers that alternative media journalists were 'not our colleagues but sometimes conduct acts of journalism’ and 'can't be considered journalists because they don't act within an ethical system’. The editors also claimed alternative media produce opinion and act as PR agents for causes or organisations. That may be true of some, but not of others. And while some editors were happy to recognise the comparative success of alternative media, they seemed to position them as fake, peripheral and at best niche. All of which might go to prove that it's industry that might be a little out of touch.
Monica Attard, CMT Co-Director