Tomorrow is World News Day, an opportunity to reflect on the value and necessity of fact-based journalism.
For those who rely on news for information, as well as those who work to report it, it is also a chance to take stock of the state of the profession and assess how well it fulfils its mission. That mission – to gather information in the public interest and report it in an accurate, timely way – has not changed. But the environment in which it takes place is in constant flux. The business model that traditionally underpinned professional journalism has been upended, while consumption patterns have been transformed by successive waves of technological innovation. That means journalism must find ways to reach audiences where they are now, rather than where they used to be.
That challenge is intensifying. The emergence of “news deserts”, at local level in particular, is concerning. The need for a new model that helps sustain objective, non-partisan reporting at local level is clear.
In today’s information-saturated environment, it becomes difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise, the important from the ephemeral or the objective truth from the deliberate misdirection. Meanwhile, media organisations themselves would do well to reflect on recent Reuters Institute research which shows a rising tide of people actively avoiding news altogether. There are no simple answers to these questions, but they can only be resolved by a relationship between news producers and news consumers that is founded on trust and accountability.
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Reporting the news is as hazardous as it has ever been. Some 116 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war in Gaza began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Hundreds more are currently imprisoned across the world, with China and Myanmar the worst offenders. That fact-based reporting is seen as such a threat by authoritarians should remind everyone of how important it remains for the maintenance of a healthy democracy.