Start fixing the news
By: John Haglund
Tags: Technology, News, Digital, Ideas, Journalism

Start fixing the news

It starts with learning a mutual language to speak critically and constructively about the news. Then creating big ideas.

Cartoon for The New Yorker. February 2017

Do not expect to get out of talking about two big P’s this year at the Thanksgiving table — Politics and Pandemic. But between mouthfuls of turkey, the conversation may turn towards an easier target. During these holidays, there will be much bullying of The News.

The news and its distribution — with the spectacular wrench of social media — are often maligned for being overwhelming, inconsistent, fake, unrepresentative, among many other ills.

A summation of such gripes might be that modern news systems have left us ill-equipped to be informed-citizens.

And there is little denying that the information landscape is barely recognizable from the past decade. Pew research in 2020 shows that one-in-five adults get their political news primarily through social media.

Willing or not, big technology companies have become intertwined with the creation and distribution of news. Therein the purpose of news perhaps faces its greatest challenge, but also opportunity.

When we are truly troubled by the systems that create and deliver the news and find its flaws detrimental to the social construct, we can do something.

Let’s learn a mutual language to speak critically and constructively about the news, and then create big ideas to fix it.

Here is where to start.

For a foundational foray on how established journalists think about journalism, look no further than the work of insiders Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism.

What these authors have done excellently are these two things. First, with a group called the Committee of Concerned Journalists, they conducted the most extensive user research study ever organized across the profession.

Through twenty-one public forums, more than one-hundred in-depth interviews, multiple surveys, a summit, and over a dozen studies, they gathered enormous amounts of qualitative and quantitative data about the news.

Then the authors synthesized and organized that information on our behalf. As output, they offer a transcendent purpose and a framework of 10 principles to evaluate modern journalism as a newsperson or a citizen. Even dated (the latest revision was 2003) the framework holds up well in the digital age.

“The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing”

Let those sink in.

One wonders whether the principles espoused in this book are heard outside of journalism schools’ walls. To be useful standards, they should be.

Agreeing or disagreeing with the principles, names, characters, and ideas espoused in Elements of Journalism goes beyond this column’s purpose. What the book does offer is an insider framework enabling us a gateway to think about journalism more critically and constructively.

So how do we fix things?

Consider an important insight from the book. The Discipline of Verification, the third principle of journalism, comes from the same intellectual roots as the scientific method. Just as with science studies, it is important to create news stories methodologically and ensure they are repeatable. Someone should be able to recreate the story with the same evidence.

How might we make journalism as credible as scientific studies? As a flash in the pan idea, think about how AI could help us do verification by creating an exhaustive list of questions to test assumptions behind each story. There could be a service for self-publishers (like myself) that tests assumptions so that the writer can self-improve their story.

This is the type of idea that can arise from breaking the news into elements, then thinking critically and constructively.

Elements are a starting point.

We should choose to be optimistic that journalism’s transcendent purpose can still be accomplished in modern society. That does not mean that the institutions that deliver it today should not change. Instead, we should boil that purpose down to its raw elements and not be afraid to design new systems that accomplish that purpose better.

Next up, let’s talk about Big Tech. What role should Facebook, Twitter, Google play as creators and distributors of the news? That is enough to make heads spin.