Although we live in a transitioning world of social communications, journalism should always preserve its essence and fundamental aims towards the face of the society it serves.
Sure the tools that allow the spreading of the news can be replaced, but not the golden rules that have given journalism its place as “the profession of knowledge”.
For the professor Wolfgan Donsbach, of the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, in this “profession of knowledge” the important thing is not knowing how to use digital tools, our secret is within the magament of the content that we are able to produce and broadcast on any of the platforms.
This premise is primordial to understand that the culture of excellent journalism doesn’t separate the essential from the casual.
Journalism, with its basic rules, is the archetype of truthful, objective, real and proven information.
The ways of transmitting news differ in any of the platforms and although there are tools to do it through texts or images, or through the new digital packaging (photos and videos), the professional journalistic method never changes.
First, because it grows from an ethical base that paves the avenue of social responsibility, which has its own standards to ensure that the information it builds about the real events reaches the public with the greatest charge of truthfulness and accuracy.
This is what allows the citizen to be fully informed in order to make decisions and on the basis of his own will, to foster in society the free expression of ideas and democratic discernment.
If standards or methods of professional journalism are contaminated to convey news of real-life events, then we incur in a fatal distortion of information.
The faked news, which have found efficient channels to be disseminated in the social media, constitute the opposite and contradictory face of high-quality journalism, which fortunately is preserved and still practiced in the main printed media and in its digital editions.
In both counterparts, tools are used to ensure the fulfillment of professional methodologies, although innovative resources and applications are dominant in the digital editions, and these allow the news to be disseminated in appropriate formats in accordance with the preferences of new users, such as podcasts or story-tellings, which strive to hold concise stories.
Susan Mitchell, from the Latin American center of journalism schools, states that “being a journalist is knowing how to tell a story, but also knowing how to do it through different platforms, to different audiences, in different times, contexts and realities”.
– Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 