From Chaos to Clarity

From the September 14, 2010 International Press Institute‘s The Press Freedom Post: As he had finished editing the final chapters of the IPI Report: Brave News Worlds in late August, the Poynter Institute’s Bill Mitchell realized that he had been changed by what he had read.

“I found my point of view shifting in a significant way,” Mitchell said. “Chaos is giving way to clarity. We are now making the shift from ‘losing the news’ to ‘finding the news’.” As head of Entrepreneurial and International Programs at Poynter, Mitchell hailed this as an important turning point. It was a sense others shared, that was reflected repeatedly in conference panels and informal discussions, and detailed in the papers included in the Report.

One strong case came from Paul Tash, CEO of the St. Petersburg Times, and chairman of the Poynter Institute that owns the paper. Tash looks back at the last several decades and suggests that the lush revenues in the industry of the 80s and 90s just before the crisis may have been the exception rather than the rule.

Embracing new ways produced some of the most interesting material in the Report: Patrick Meier’s discussion of importance of “crowdsourcing” shows how a mapping a technique developed in Kenya was used for other crises like the Haitian earthquake, informing humanitarian workers in real time. Mario Garcia’s discussion of the iPad suggests how new possibilities for presentation and storytelling can attract new audiences and satisfy traditionalists at the same time.

One of the defining changes of the new environment is the amount of raw material, the simple profusion of information that floats around cyberspace un-interpreted and unused.

“I see data as the atomic particles of electronic journalism,” said Mitchell. With the cost barriers of publishing lifted, it arrives in cyberspace in unimaginable volume, dormant. “Most of it meaningless, because no one has done anything with it. It’s the next task of journalism to figure out how to put this material to use.”

However a recurring theme throughout the Report, from Jean-Francois Fogel’s critiques of “Luddites in the newsrooms” to Bill Nichol’s report on Politico’s success in “niche journalism” is the importance of audience.
“The journalist’s first allegiance is always to the reader, the user, the viewer,” Mitchell said. Any other obligations, to sponsors, advertisers, political parties or governments, jeopardize journalism’s purpose – which is “to give the public the information it needs to govern itself.”

Photo: David Reali


 

Dardis McNamee is the Editor and Publisher of The Vienna Review, Director of the Vienna Journalism Institute and on the Research Faculty of Media Communications at Webster University Vienna in Austria.