In this world of media, journalists and informants do cohabit on the net, but their fundamental roles are really different.
For the newspapers work the “people who tell other people what happens to people”. That’s a masterful definition of Eugenio Scalfari, founder of the newspapers La Republica, from Italy.
And on social media gravitate, by billions, those who communicate a diversity of events and opinions that mark the daily heartbeat or vital pulse of all humanity, in a different perspective from that of the pure and simple journalism.
Two dynamics converge at once in this media ecosystem, that of the immediacy of the dissemination the of events, whether real or not, and that of a more relaxed process of gathering, checking, purifying and organizing the information to keep the truthfulness and objectivity in place.
This last valuable asset of journalism is the one that must be preserved over the immediacies or superficialities that saturate the digital networks, and believe me it’s possible to “tell people what happens to people” through any of the platforms that the multiplatforms of today manage.
It’s enough to stick to the basic rules of what we know as professional journalism, which requires a scrupulous handling of the information that will be published, in a way that the end result fits in with the actual truth, which requires avoiding rushes, biases and even the torrent of fake news.
A remedy against the immediacy of the 24/7 communicative onslaught of the current media ecosystem, is that which the world’s leading newspapers and magazines are applying to delve into the issues that truly affect the interests of the majority of the public, gathering all the pieces of an event to then be put together and solve the puzzle of reality.
For this, the very first thing that must be understood is that the newspapers are no longer here to share the latest news, but to offer those that resist the test of time and objectivity, those that help the reader or the general public to distill all of the information, ideas and episodes that allow for the best discernment of what happens.
If journalism is the first draft of history, those who exercise this job in a professional level must be fully aware that the handling of information requires supreme care, that is, a lot of precision and verification, and that in this era of rush for data the best choice will always be to play the turtle and not the hare throughout the entire competition.
– Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 