Journalism hasn’t been in the best place lately.
It’s no secret; we’ve known for a while. Newsrooms continue to be decimated, publications and broadcasts scraping by as best they can, local coverage relegated to an afterthought.
The reasons for this upheaval will no doubt be examined for some time, as they should be if the profession charged with drafting history intends to learn from its own.
Benefits of hindsight aside, the question remains:
Where to from here?
In many ways this is a time of learning, healing and growing; of deepening our understanding of each other and our respective places in culture, society and the global community. It’s a time of re-examining and rethinking domains such as criminal justice, civil rights and environmental policy, to name a few. Likewise, control of and access to media and digital content, including news, continue to evolve.
It is a time of evolution, a time of experimentation and emergence. Innovative editorial, ownership and revenue structures challenge long-held assumptions regarding business models, representation and gatekeeping. New technologies expand possibilities for collaborative information gathering and interactive storytelling. As threats of misinformation loom large and bad actors or AI demonstrate the worst of our potential, new platforms and approaches unite previously disparate and disconnected groups, helping to find sanity in facts and sort signals from noise. These opportunities hold the potential to help us all — professionals, enthusiasts, allies and everyone — be more digitally literate, informed and responsible citizens, neighbors and communities.
So despite plenty of reasons to be discouraged about the world in general and the news industry in particular, I feel differently.
There’s plenty more to this discussion of course, but for now I’m just going to say again:
This is a
very exciting time.
