In this digital era, we are going through more drastic and profound changes than what the professional journalism had experienced in the past three centuries, basically in its schemes and shapes but not in its core or its original mission.
No matter how intense the race of immediacy and the pressure to adapt to the new technologies that revolutionize the original concept are, journalism has to continue chiseling itself as truth, in a realistic news context and in its capacity to add transparency to the realities of our society.
It can’t fall into the temptations of prioritizing quantity over quality, in an effort to achieve higher audiences, sacrificing its original goal of serving as a point of confluence of the free exchange of ideas from the citizens, impeding misinformation or the harmful manipulation of reality that can cause a great decline of trust to the press.
The quality journalism is the one that helps the citizen to be well informed in order to know, analyze and decide on the issues that affect their rights and freedoms and, based on such discernment, demand to the governments to be accountable and fulfill their obligations in respect to those individual and collective rights.
This is the way in which citizens feel themselves involved in the conduct of the destinies of a society and the journalism has played to a large extent that role of intermediation, guarantor of life under democracy.
For this reason, it’s unacceptable that the survival of the press is being threatened by an emerging power that pretends to control what is published and what not, how it’s published, for who and where it is published, controlling the technologies of the digital platforms that dominate the social communications nowadays.
The contrasted and reliable information, which must be rigorously processed by the media that respects truthfulness and objectivity, is one of those values that serves as an antidote to the made up or fake news that today erode the quality and reliability of a big portion of the content in the Internet.
Hence the great challenges of the authentic journalism consist in ensuring the survival of these intrinsic values of democracy, maintain a non-negotiable attachment to the truth in its contents and a very well researched management and exposure of these, without succumbing to the immediacy, the vagueness or the banalization that has already become latent in other media.
This line of commitment has been assumed by the major newspapers of the United States, such as The New York Times and the Washington Post, which have bet to the digital technologies but without giving up on the best traditions of the authentic journalism, which according to my convictions, should prevail in the rest of the free press of the world.
– Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 