Early summer in Stockholm sees the sun set at midnight and rise again at 2.30am, making this beautiful city of water and shimmering sunlight a suitably disorientating place to examine the unsettling future of journalism.
Readers' editors from around the world gathered in this almost continual daylight last week to consider the future of an industry which is going through monumental change, with journalists everywhere examining how they work and where they produce that work - in print, online, in podcasts or on video.
There was considerable angst in the air. Cultural change is always unsettling, particularly when the way ahead is not at all clear. 'Old' media are told that they have to find ways to involve readers in a continual, enriching, 24-hour online dialogue. Journalists can no longer stand aloof, the argument goes. Ignore the audience and you will perish.
Nonsense, say the traditionalists. All this detracts from the central duty of any media organisation, to tell the truth as it sees it.
Jane B Singer of the University of Central Lancashire spoke of the blurring lines between the producer and the consumer, with the journalist no longer the sole purveyor or 'gatekeeper' of the news. She told the Organisation of News Ombudsmen about her research into the blog 'conversation' on commentisfree at guardian.co.uk - which she described as the widest-ranging of its kind anywhere - and her conversations with journalists at the Guardian and The Observer who expressed concern at the veracity of some of the blogs, their challenge to the authority of the newspapers and the level of abuse hurled at some of the columnists. She thought the dialogue was like 'a very raucous party, one where there is no cover charge and no one guarding the gate'.
Joakim Jardenberg, of web development agency Mindpark, believed the abuse would disappear once journalists really engaged with bloggers, who behave, he said, like angry teenagers because they are not being listened to. 'Mainstream media are seen as the enemy. They think they own the story and they own the audience. They don't.'
Where does this leave the readers' editor, whose focus is often on the needs of the silent majority rather than those who make the most noise? With readers now able to access information from myriad sources, traditional media are going to have to actively demonstrate their trustworthiness, which is where we come in. Our task will continue to be one of trying to maintain ethical standards, to correct our errors and to explain the workings of the media.
Jardenberg would go further. He would have us stop calling ourselves ombudsmen and look upon ourselves as nurturers of an online community, a proposal that had some of the members muttering in their beards ... but the times they are a changin'.
· Read full coverage of the conference at newsombudsmen.org
 |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment