The internet ushered in a new age of enlightenment, a period where information can be consumed and propagated anywhere, from your home to a hotel room halfway around the world, data can now be streamed and received in an instant. The same could also be said for the profession of journalism.
Today there is an ever growing shift from more traditional mediums to more unconventional ones. This is primarily brought upon by the advent of the internet. From a global perspective, almost all news organizations have an online service, where the public could find almost all of the information available from the more traditional medium like print or broadcast. Locally, large online news organizations dominate the internet, all the three major broadsheets have websites and the two largest TV networks have a strong online presence as well.
But with the growth of the internet, more people have been involved in the process of news making. The so called troop of citizen journalists, or people who have no journalism training who have utilized the internet to deliver news, have seen a steady rise. The internet has grown to be a viable medium where the citizenry feels empowered enough to defy editorial agenda and set it themselves.
This practice of a more involved public in the news making process is slowly being integrated in the country, where organizations like GMA and ABS-CBN have utilized social media and then internet as a whole to provide news from a community perspective. GMA has YouScoop a website attached to its news service where the public can upload, photos videos and stories through the internet or through Short Messaging Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). On the other hand ABS-CBN has the iPatrol where the public can produce its own news package and broadcast it in the networks primetime news programs such as TV Patrol and Bandila. These examples also utilized viewer involvement by contributing other angles that has not been explored by the news program.
With the changes brought upon by the growth of the internet both locally and internationally, news organizations do not only experience positive transformations but negative as well. In the United States and other western countries where the internet is more prevalent, because of stronger and more reliable internet services, newspapers are folding up due to bankruptcy. Some newspapers have been badly hurt by the growth of the online news media, first because it is offered free to the public unlike newspapers which you have to buy from a newsstand or pay for through subscription packages. Second, because the online medium, as it stands now, has no substantial and reliable business model. Advertising online is not similar to advertising through print and broadcast, as they say it’s a different animal.
“[The biggest problem for a news website is] keeping up with our users’ ever-changing media consumption habits. Technologies and platforms are changing on a month to month basis. We have to keep up with all the formats being demanded of us. Another major problem is business model. Traditional business models as have been practiced in television, print, and radio no longer necessarily apply to the web. The market for online advertising in the Philippines is still emerging. One major challenge is how to justify the continued investment of resources in web and mobile while not being able to deliver immediate return. The key is to keep experimenting so that a viable business model emerges for online news,” GMA News Online Multimedia Producer Pia Faustino said.
But if the online medium has a problem, the traditional mediums are in a conundrum. In a study conducted by American Public Relations Firm Oriella which asked 770 editors from 15 countries about how they see online journalism affecting their organizations, 53% believe that many news organizations may be pushed to fold or close because of the emergence of online media. It also revealed that 1 in 6 of those surveyed had already experienced the closure of their organization because of the sudden increase of online media usage.
With the threats and opportunities posed by the online medium to more traditional mediums it is safe to surmise that the internet has brought many changes to the field of journalism. Some would even argue that it has shaken things up so much that it is now edging out the other, more traditional, mediums of mass communication. It has exposed the weaknesses that had come to define the mediums utilized by journalist. It had made many see that newspapers lacked immediacy and broadcast lacked depth and insight, the internet had both and so much more, it is a virtual one-stop shop, where videos, sound bites, and articles abound.
“[The online medium is] very viable. More and more people are turning to the internet for their daily news. In fact, the internet presents a different problem than before. Whereas previously, people dealt with the lack of information, our generation now deals with a surplus of information. There is a greater and greater need to make sense of the wealth of information that is out there, and to help ordinary people determine what is important and what is true. That’s where news websites still serve their purpose,” Faustino said.
The future of social media in journalism
Social media has been very important in the lives of most Filipinos. It has served as a way to communicate with others in a very convenient way. All that was needed was a basic internet connection and a computer and instantly the user is connected to all of his friends and contacts all around the country and the world.
This idea of instant connection has been a very big hit all around the globe. Filipino started getting hooked to it through Friendster and later on Facebook and now many other social networking sites like Twitter, Foursquared, LinkedIn and Google+.
The same advantages posed by these sites has been attractive to news organizations all around the world, with events happening at break-neck speed and at different locations, news organizations can form stories through contribution of the public, this is called crowd-sourced stories. But aside from this, news outfits have also taken great measures to include social networking to the way they deliver the news.
“Social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are getting way more traffic than almost any website, including news websites, in the Philippines. On one hand these sites are competition for our networks, but on the other hand they also present an opportunity as these social networking sites greatly influence the news that people consume. We have to find more ways to make our stories and content social or viral in nature, and to leverage social media as a news distribution channel,” Faustino said.
Organizations like CNN, BBC, Reuters, Agence France Presse, and the Associated Press have all kept several social media accounts. The same is also the case for local organizations like GMA and ABS-CBN. All of these organizations have teams devoted to updating the public about breaking news through social networking sites.
“Social media has become so dominant online that we have had to form a special team focused solely on managing our social media presence. There are six full-time employees who manage our FB [Facebook] and Twitter 24/7, both pushing stories out and pulling in content and feedback,” Faustino said.
This practice is slowly turning out as the norm in the changing fields of the profession.
But technology site Mashable.com said that the social media in the journalistic concept would soon die out, as every report would have a social aspect to it.
“The future of social media in journalism will see the death of ―social media.‖ That is, all media as we know it today will become social, and feature a social component to one extent or another. After all, much of the web experience, particularly in the way we consume content, is becoming social and personalized,” an editorial at Mashable.com said.
The editorial added that this trend would lead to more people working as citizen journalists reporting about things that happen in their communities, while professional journalists would provide insight and much needed context to these events. This will mean that journalists would become more participatory in the community and would have a more active citizenship—one where they are not only storytellers but also catalysts for effective change.
The editorial also explains that the process of involving the public in delivering the news would redefine what we know about collaborative reporting now. Mashable.com says that in the present context collaborative reporting means there is collaboration between the reporter and his traditional source, they work together to develop a story that is insightful, informative and enlightening. But with the emergence of new media the public now writes the news, they dictate what should be talked about and what should be prioritized. They also have become empowered because social media enables them to tell the story as they see it. Many users who have first-hand experience of an event that is deemed news worthy are in a better place to put the events in context as they experienced for themselves.
“Social media by its very definition is a participatory medium. There is a potential for greater engagement and connection with the community, but only if journalists are open to ceding a degree of editorial control to the community,” Alfred Hermida an Integrated Journalism Professor at the University of British Columbia said.
The pay-off for this practice of journalism has the capacity to be great. A startup company in Washington, D.C. called TBD.com has enlisted some bloggers to help the website put-together stories which has led them to gain scoops about several events around the capital of the United States.
Locally, community based news organizations like Bulacan’s Mabuhay! have used social media to incite discussion about several local topics in last year’s election. The weekly newspaper hosted a miting de avance of candidates for the gubernatorial seat in the province. The questions were sourced from audience members who were invited through social networking sites. Mabuhay! used the information they gathered in this forum to publish several special interest stories about the problems of the province and how the candidates aimed to solve those problems.
“Journalists must be able to pivot quickly between the ideas of using the community as a source of news and as the audience for news, because they are both,” Storyful.com Editor David Clinch said.
Community as a source of news
Established practices and beliefs in the profession are starting to be called into questions and in the process, journalists are turning more and more to unconventional means of data- gathering.
One vibrant example of this is the American initiative, Public Insight Network (PIN). According to Andrew Haeg, a Minneapolis-based journalist and one of the founding members of PIN, the program is a “targeted and data-driven, crowd sourcing program.” Targeted in a sense that the program focuses at a specific group of people at a specific point in time; for example if a journalist would want to discuss cardiovascular diseases, to gather information about this, he would tailor-fit the methodologies he would use for his interviewee. In the model used by PIN, a person with specialty in the subject would be the target source of the journalist, may he be a medical professional, a patient or a family member of a patient suffering from the disease, they would fill out the questionnaires which would be processed for the use of the writer and all the other answers would be stored in a database for future resource and use of other journalists.
According to Haeg, who recently visited Manila to deliver a series of lectures about social media and networked journalism, this process of gathering information from the widest variety of people in effect widens the horizons and prospective of a journalist as it allows him to write more in-depth and more analytical stories which in return informs the public more and allows them to form informed opinions and choices.
“The journalist taps into community sources, who are more informed and more invested in the problems that surround them, they have first-hand information about the topics that journalists would want to write about,” Haeg said.
PIN uses a simple website where a question, posted by a journalist who belongs in one of their partner news organization, is answered by people who have direct knowledge about the topic that is being discussed. The form is laid out simply and can be easily filled out by anyone.
Haeg said that this kind of data form is inviting to users who want to contribute to a developing story, as it presents a no frills and no hassle way to contribute. A source’s identity is also protected as only accredited members of PIN’s network has direct access to it.
Haeg added that the system also allows the public to bring their concerns directly to the forefront of the public agenda. He told one anecdote where a local newspaper with the help of Haeg’s network documented the illegal use of trailer trucks of secondary roads. The heavy load carried by these trucks can quickly weaken paved roads. It also poses great danger to residents as it can cause accidents. To resolve this problem, people in the neighborhood started jotting down plate numbers of trailer trucks and sent it over the PIN website. With this information, the network contacted local authorities and soon, the ordinance banning these kinds of trucks in secondary roads was strictly enforced.
“This is an example of journalism which we employ in the Public Insight Network, it is proactive. We do not only get to write good stories that capture people’s attention but we also play a role in the resolution of the problem,” Haeg said.
It is this kind of results that Haeg wishes to bring a system much like the one currently used by PIN in the Philippines, as it poses great potential because of the high number of Filipinos with social networking profiles. The country also boasts its affinity for mobile phones.
But unlike in the United States where smartphones, or phones equipped with advanced connectivity options like Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and 3G which allows a user to be connected to the internet all the time, are commonplace, the Philippines has a very low smartphone to basic phone ratio. Thus, Haeg is pitching in with the idea to develop software that could register the contributions by a possible source through text or simple call. This would allow Filipinos, even those in far-flung areas to actively participate in crafting the news.
“This would be an important tool, that would further reinvigorate Philippine democracy, as it would allow more people to be heard by your government, this would also open doors to the resolution of corruption and other social ills in the country,” Haeg said.
At this stage this plan is still being carefully developed, Haeg adds that the Philippines is a very ideal country to be the first place to conduct this experiment in. To date there are almost 85 million Filipinos who have call phones, and this is where PIN plans to capitalize.
“The Philippines is known to be the texting capital of the world, this would be very ideal for the replication of a system we use in America, only scaled down for use in the Philippines,” Haeg said.
New media same old ethics
Journalism is a constant whether it is in print, television, radio or even the internet it does not change. People expect the same thing out of journalists and that is true, unbiased and accurate reports. So social networks, news websites and the like might offer speedy and insightful stories, but they need to be placed scrutinized in the same way that news material are scrutinized in more traditional venues of journalism.
“Facebook and Twitter are just like any other medium. In using these sites to distribute news information, we apply the same basic tenets of journalism. Verify the facts, air balanced views, be fair. At times it’s a little more of a challenge to do this on Social Media because there is a lot of misinformation that can easily spread online. Before posting something on FB or Twitter we just always make sure to verify the information through traditional means– meaning by checking with multiple sources, corroboration, et cetera. The challenge here is that users are demanding us to be faster and faster in breaking news. This means we have to work faster,” GMA News Online’s Faustino said.
Faustino adds that in GMA News Online, just like any news organization, there is a set of editors that ensure that articles pass the strict standards that is expected to be imposed on an article.
“We have editors who assign our reporters and stringers to cover certain stories based on the news agenda. News editors have to consider what issues are relevant, important, and interesting to our audiences. Reporters then cover the stories to which they are assigned. But of course, reporters can also pitch and produce their own story ideas and submit these to the editors for publication. Editors’ main role is to ensure our stories are well-written, fair, balanced, and factual,” Faustino said.
The internet is very free, there are no restrictions on what one can or cannot say online. But sometimes this has been to the detriment of the profession with people pushing fallacies and rumors going viral in a matter of minutes, journalism and the defined set of standards that accompany it is much more difficult to impose. But University of Florida Journalism Professor Mindy Mc Adams said that there should be no compromise between standards whether online or offline.
“It’s not so much a question of standards, as in standards of truth, or ethics. The standards go straight across all media, whether they are journalistic standards, standards for accuracy or fairness, or aesthetic standards. There is no “offline” and “online” when it comes to standards — only a little time lag, because online is faster,” Mc Adams said.
But she said that there has been palpable erosion of the values that has come to define journalism as a profession because of the advent of the internet. She added that this must be rectified quickly as it may lead to more users losing trust on their local news organizations. But Mc Adams is quick to dispel any idea that online journalism is to blame about the loss of trust that news organizations go through now.
“I’m not about to lay blame for declining audience trust on the online folks, though. That blame belongs to the journalism organizations that repeatedly failed to investigate and halt plagiarism and fabrication in their print newsrooms; to TV pundit shows that play at being journalistic when in fact their talking heads spew slippery facts and imprudent opinions; and to local TV news anchors who repeat the same provocative teases six times between 9 and 11 p.m., only to deliver a complete letdown at 11:17 (“And then the grandmother found her little dog, unharmed!”),” Mc Adams said in an online discussion.
Adopting online freedom doesn’t mean loosening of standards
The internet is a unique and powerful tool, is everything that we know about journalism rolled into one. It allows readers and other users to have freedom and choose what they want to read or watch and when. It also serves as an empowering catalyst that involves the public in the many stages of the news gathering process.
But it also places traditional media in a very difficult place because of the same reasons cited above. It has radically changed the playing field, giving early adopters an upper hand as they had learned the tricks of the online journalism trade.
Though the internet is many things at the same time, when used for journalism it needs to be one thing and that is trust worthy. Online journalism needs to be placed in a position where it is scrutinized in a way that newspapers and TV or Radio programs are scrutinized. Anything below than that is simply a disservice to the public and to the profession.
They say that in online journalism, unlike in print or broadcast journalism, objectivity does not mean trust worthiness, transparency makes online journalism trust worthy. Transparency in a sense that the reader or viewer has the capacity to trace the data and information presented in the report.
But transparency will never be enough, the vital tenets of journalism will never and should never lose its importance and neither should the good practice that traditional journalists have developed in the course of their practice. These are as important as the information that journalists convey. These values are also prerequisites of credibility—the single most valuable commodity in the profession today.
As Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing of The Guardian says: “Embracing the new doesn’t mean you have to ditch the old. Smart organizations are taking the opportunities that the Net offers them for immediacy and interactivity and combining them with their traditional standards.”
Journalist must never do away with responsible and accountable reportage, because we can easily integrate it with current trends offered by the internet, because good journalism, wherever it may be published, is a service to the public and a fulfillment of our obligation to provide information necessary for a free society.
