Journalism, a career with a future
Posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014 by ATC in Content Is King with No Comments
By Clement Charles, CEO & Founder, AllTheContent News Agency
In a press crisis context, the title of this article may strike readers as naïve. But a closer look shows that we are all willing to accept the idea that today’s information society will only be possible… with information.
Although numbers in the profession are dropping in Switzerland and abroad, journalism, with its principles and methods, is becoming increasingly essential in an ever more complex post-modern society. More generally, while professional journalist numbers may be dropping in the West, journalistic activity is drastically increasing across the planet. Journalism has in effect become a career with a future, for several reasons.
First, for democracy. Informed choice can only occur if it is fueled by a variety of information, be it independent or not, subjective or objective, and ideally identified as such. In other words, to be independent, information must rest beyond the scope of an author’s personal subjectivity, (unlike citizen journalism, which necessarily stems from personal involvement), and ensure authors a fair income (allowing them to invest time in research, finding, and sometimes even falling short).
Secondly, in terms of existing and future media – in today’s world, everything has become a form of media. Newspapers, television and radio stations remain at the center of our media landscape, joined since the beginning of the millennium by Web and mobile sites, digital signage or IP-TV and its applications. Meanwhile, companies and manufacturers are turning to ever more information as differentiators and as indirect marketing tools aimed at creating added value. Furthermore, all screens capable of broadcasting information and content do so, from refrigerators to coffee machines, rowing machines to cash points.
Why, to treat data, of course! Between our digital and our statistical lives, each day trillions of new data are created and stored. Forced into transparency by the current legislative trend (with open data) or by popular pressure and the hackers who represent it (Wikileaks), this data is becoming increasingly publicly available. But making information accessible does not make it necessarily understandable, and even less so does it equate to generating meaning. Again, journalistic activity and its methods are what draw intelligible facts from masses of information, whether one is a professional (such as the Spiegel or the New York Times with Wikileaks), or a group of concerned citizens (such as the Guardian and the United Kingdom’s parliamentary expenses scandal).
The mission to treat and give meaning to data and information falls in line with “curation,” by establishing a link with the very raison d’être of a journalistic fact: democracy. For years, various forms of censorship actively suppressed expressions of dissidence, but censorship today is reduced to drowning out alternative information in a deluge of insignificant content… In other words, we have shifted from an imperative “shut up” to “keep on shouting, no one can hear you in this ruckus.”
Socially, journalism contains all the elements to become a career of the future. To do so, it must be perceived as such by current professionals, whose main mission ought to be becoming indispensable to the citizen-readers who shaped them into a profession in the first place.
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